Hostile Witness

42

I GREW UP WITH MY FATHER in a Spanish-style bungalow in a suburban enclave of Spanish-style bungalows the developer had enthusiastically titled Hollywood. There was the Hollywood Tavern, where the working men of Hollywood escaped to a cool, red-tinged darkness and twenty-five-cent beers, the Hollywood Drugstore, dusty plate windows with small, hand-lettered signs, and an all-night donut shop that broke the tradition and was not called Hollywood Donuts but instead Donut Towne, the final “e” the only bit of class remaining in the neighborhood. It wasn’t a terrible place to live, this Hollywood, and after the war when it had just been built it had been quite a thing, but it wasn’t much compared to the sprawling five-bedroomed manses with rolling lawns that surrounded it.

There was something about my neighborhood that I had always thought pathetic. Maybe it was the way the houses seemed to have been built rundown, maybe it was the way a scrappy flora had risen through the sidewalk cracks, turning the concrete slabs into rubble, and nobody did a thing about it. Maybe it was the whole idea of there being a Hollywood in the middle of this suburb outside of Philadelphia, as if in that little six-block area of cracked and decaying bungalows there lived John Wayne and Jimmy Stewart and Vera Miles and Yvette Mimieux, making movies and throwing barbecues in their seedy little backyards. I guess if the whole of the school district had been made of places like Hollywood I wouldn’t have minded it so much, but it was a rich school district and my classmates were rich and I wasn’t. Though we had a television and heat and always enough food, I could never shake the feeling that I grew up in a slum.

The Sunday after my meeting with Tony Baloney I drove past Donut Towne and the Hollywood Tavern and into the maw of my childhood. The trees that had been big and sturdy in my youth were now ancient and twisted. Many had fallen, taking the sidewalk with them, and this, along with the surviving trees having just shed their autumn leaves, had the effect of letting fall a cold, hard light so that the neighborhood seemed brighter than I ever remembered it to be. Every time I came back home the neighborhood seemed brighter than I ever remembered it to be. Nome, Alaska, during the six-month darkness of winter would be brighter than I ever remembered my old neighborhood to be. There, in front of that ranch house, there was where Tommy DiNardo used to beat me up after elementary school. Oh and there, over there, was where Debbie Paulsen jumped on top of me and, holding me down, kissed me and licked me and felt up my chest. Was I the only boy in my neighborhood to be raped by Debbie Paulsen, five feet and 180 pounds of frustrated Catholic flesh? And yes, there, right there, in a gap under that porch, fixed now so that you’d never know, but there was where I hid the day my mother left, shouting curses at my father as he snarled silently back at her from our front stoop. Ah, childhood in Hollywood, did ever shit smell sweeter?

I guess I was coming home for perspective. I had a decision to make and I figured here was where I would make it. I had to decide what I wanted, what my obligations were, how to attack my future. I had to decide what I should be when I grew up, and so home I came, to my father. I hadn’t called but I knew he’d be there. The Eagles were on television, which gave him a fine excuse to do that which he did every night after work and all day Saturdays and Sundays: sit in front of the tube, drink beer, cough. I dropped the knocker twice onto the door. There was a button there to press, but it hadn’t worked since I was nine.

“What do you want?” my father said when he opened the door and saw his son standing behind the screen with a sickly smile on his face.

I lifted the six-pack of Rolling Rock beer I had brought. “You watching the game?”

He turned from me without opening the screen door and shambled back to his seat. “No. There’s golf on Channel Six.”

In case you missed it, that was my father’s idea of a joke.

I think to understand my father you had to have understood my mother, all that she wanted, all that she felt she missed out on in her life because of marrying my father, the reasons that she left us for a trailer in Arizona. Unfortunately I had never understood anything about my mother beyond the fact that she was committably crazy and so my father remained something of a mystery too. He was a big man, bristly white hair, thick fingers, a quiet, hardworking, unambitious man with a bitterness cultivated by his ten years with my mother, a bitterness that had now bloomed into an ugly overripe flower he wore pinned to his breast like some beastly corsage. It was this same bitterness, I believed, that had manifested itself as the spots on his lungs that the X-rays were not erasing, just holding in check. The doctors all said he should be dead by now, he told me over and over, and I could never tell if he said it out of pride or disappointment.

I sat down on the sofa and twisted off the top of a Rock. He was in the easy chair, a can of Iron City in his hand. You could buy Iron City in the deli for $1.72 a six-pack. My father always had a taste for the finer things.

“How are they doing?” I asked.

“They’re bums.”

“The Eagles or the Jets?”

“They’re all bums.” He coughed, a loud hacking cough that brought up something. He spit into a paper towel on the table beside the chair and didn’t look at it. “And the money they make. These bums couldn’t hold the jockstraps of players like Bednarik and Gifford.”

“Then why do you watch every week?”

“To have my judgment confirmed.”

“I haven’t seen you in a while. You look pretty good.”

He coughed again. “The doctors all tell me I should be dead by now.”

“Yeah, but what do they know, right?”

“That’s what I always say.”

“Is that so?”

“Now you’re being a smartass.”

“One of my inherited traits.”

“From your mother.”

“No. From you.”

His face grayed and he hacked out something else for the paper towel. “Ah, what do you know?”

“What’s the score?” I asked.

“Fourteen-seven, Eagles.”

“They’re not playing like bums today.”

“This is the Jets. Let’s see them play the Cowboys. In their hearts they’s bums.”

We watched the game in near silence, throwing out charming bons mots as the play progressed, things like “He’s got hands like feet,” when a receiver dropped a ball, and “He couldn’t tackle his sister,” when a running back spun off a safety’s hit, but basically keeping our thoughts to ourselves, the television commentary interrupted only by my father’s coughs. We even sat in front of the halftime show, snippets from the band, hyperactivity from the commentators in the booth, a string of commercials about cars and beer. Sometime during the third quarter I realized that my beer was warming, so I took the now half-empty six into the kitchen. What I saw in the refrigerator was depressing. There was beer, there was an old milk carton, there were things I couldn’t identify in the back. Ice was growing from the refrigerant cables. What was so depressing was that the inside of my father’s refrigerator looked very much like the inside of my own.

“You should clean out your fridge sometime,” I said when I sat back down.

“Why?”

Why indeed? Stumped again, I thought. Stumped again by my father.

“What about that five thousand you owe me?” he asked after the game, when the only thing on was the golf tournament on Channel 6, which my father had decided to watch rather than do the unthinkable and turn off the set.

“That was what I came about,” I said. “Or something like it.”

“Well, do you got it or not?”

“Do you need it?”

“I could use it, sure,” he said.

“I could get it if you need it.”

“I didn’t say I needed it.”

“You said you could use it.”

“It’s not the same thing. Everyone could use it. Donald Trump could use it, but he don’t need it.”

“Bad example,” I said.

“Yeah, well, maybe.”

“Do you need it?”

“No.”

“Good,” I said. “Because I don’t have it.”

The tournament leader pulled a five-footer past the hole.

“That’s not to mean I couldn’t use it,” he said.

“I’ll get it for you, then.”

“Look at that putt he missed,” my father said, waving disgustedly at the screen. “Bums. For fifth place they get fifty thou. Who the hell cares about winning anymore?”

So we watched golf for a bit, seduced into somnolence by the rhythm of the game, the setup, the waggle, the step back, the waggle, the swing, ball disappearing into the screen only to reappear as a tiny speck spinning forward on the fairway. The shadows in the house were getting longer now, the room was darkening. I glanced over during one of the crucial putts and my father was asleep in the chair, head back, mouth open, breathing noisily through his diseased and rotting lungs. He woke up with a start when Greg Norman made a long twisting putt and the crowd applauded wildly.

“Who? What?” he stammered.

“Norman just made a putt.”

“There’s a bum. You want to know how to become a great golfer? Play Norman in a playoff.”

“The trick is getting to the playoff in the first place.”

“There’s always a trick,” he said. “I’m just telling you how is all.”

“Tell me about Grandpop,” I said and that quieted him for a moment.

“What about him?”

“I met someone who knew him from the shul in Logan. Someone who used to buy shoes from him.”

“Yeah, well, he went to shul and sold shoes,” said my father. “What else is there?”

“And sing, right?”

“Sure, he used to sing all the time. He had a voice, but it still drove me crazy.”

“How come you stopped going to shul?” I asked.

“Old men singing sad songs in a dead language. Prayers in Aramaic. You know what is Aramaic?”

“No.”

“Nothing in the world is deader than Aramaic,” he said.

“What happened when you stopped? Didn’t Grandpop try to make you go?”

“What was he going to do? I outweighed him when I was twelve. He didn’t have much control over me. I was a bad kid.”

“Did you love him?” I asked.

“What kind of question is that?”

“I’m just asking.”

“He was my father. What do you think?”

A few holes went by on the television, a few drives, a six iron to the green, a sand shot, a putt from three feet that missed, a twenty-footer that found the cup.

“When did we stop going to synagogue?” I asked.

“All of a sudden you care?”

“I’m just asking.”

“It was your mother who kept that stuff going. She wanted to belong to the fancy place with all the rich dressers. She thought belonging there would give her class. She could have married the Queen of England she still wouldn’t have had no class, and believe me, I ain’t the Queen of England. The dues were killing us but that’s what she wanted so that’s what we did. When she left I didn’t see any point.”

“I should have been bar mitzvahed,” I said, and I don’t know why I said it because I had never thought it before in my entire life.

“And I should have been rich. So what’s life but regrets.”

“If Grandpop had still been alive, he would have made sure I got bar mitzvahed,” I said. My voice seemed to fill with a great bitterness whenever I came home and it did again just then.

“You always were a whiner, you know that,” said my father. “It was always ‘I hate this’ and ‘I hate that,’ I just wanted to smack you all the time. Two people in the world knew how to get at me and they got to be my wife and kid. Well, quit being such a little whining snotnose already and grow up. Everything doesn’t got to be done for you, you can do it yourself if you want. There ain’t no age limit. Do it, I don’t care, just quit whining about it. Look, I did it and believe me, you didn’t miss nothing.”

“I didn’t know you were bar mitzvahed.”

“Yeah, well, there’s a hell of a lot you don’t know,” he said.

“Did you have a big party?”

“It wasn’t like that then. My mother made a brisket and we had a cousin or two over, that’s all. Nowadays, shit, they set up tents and serve lobster Newburg. Lobster Newburg, clams casino, a band with a colored singer. How do you figure that?”

“I would have liked a party.”

“You didn’t have no friends. Who would we have invited, the President?”

After golf there was 60 Minutes, the little ticking clock, the talking head, the reporter with his incredulous tone as though the scam he discovered was anything but expected. I am shocked, shocked, he seemed to say, that there are companies out there defrauding the government. It was dark now, the shadows had spread to cover everything. My father’s face, slack in its thralldom of the television, was illuminated in a shifting light.

“I have a problem I need to talk to you about,” I said.

“How much do you need now?”

“It’s not like that.”

“This time, maybe,” he said.

“I have to make a decision about something. I have this case, the one I’ve been on television with.”

“You been on television?”

“Don’t act like that, you’ve seen me. I know you have.”

“I thought it was you but I wasn’t sure. You look better on TV.”

“So I should have been a television star, then?”

“You’d be better than that Bryant Gumbel, I’ll tell you that,” he said. “There’s a bum if ever I saw one.”

“In this case I have a client who’s in serious trouble. It’s a criminal case and it looks like he is going to lose, but he doesn’t want me to do anything about it. Now I think I know who did what he is supposed to have done, and I think I know how to prove it, but it would cost me.”

“Cost you? How much?”

“I’ve been offered a job, a really good job, a job like I’ve always wanted, but the job will come through only if I don’t rock the boat. And I’ve been offered a lot of money for another case, enough money that I could pay you back with interest, but again only if I let my client go down. There are deals that I’m on that I won’t be on if I do it. And the group who is paying me to represent this guy probably won’t pay me if I cause trouble, or that’s just the way it seems. So the whole thing could mean a lot to me, the money and the job. But on the other side of the ledger, I’m like a lawyer and my client is going down and I feel that I have to do something about it, anything, even if it costs me. So I’m not sure what to do.”

There was a long silence between us, ably filled by the television set, an interview with an old entertainer, Morley Safer shaking his head over and over in amazement. Then, without turning from the television, my father spoke.

“Take the money,” he said.

He coughed loudly, hacking something big and weighty into the paper towel.

“Take the money,” he said. “It don’t come around that often.”

There was another long pause as a string of commercials played out and then the annoying skirl of Andy Rooney. My father switched the channel, surfing to find something, ending back in failure with Andy Rooney. Rooney had a pile of products before him and he was reading the labels.

“That’s what you could do on television,” he said. “You could whine as good as him.”

“You ever have a chance for real money?” I asked.

There was a long pause before he said, “Marty Sokowsky.”

“I don’t know him.”

“Sokowsky Chevrolet and Subaru out on 611. I grew up with Sokowsky in Logan. Right out of high school he had a proposition for me. Meat. He was going into the meat business, you know, not growing meat or chopping meat but selling meat. He wanted to be a salesman.”

“What kind of meat?”

“Pigs, cows, chicken, meat. The whole thing was a little shady, you know, selling second quality as first, bait and switch, it wasn’t nothing about meat, really, it was about sucking out the money. I wasn’t sure about it and the idea of telling your grandfather that I was selling pork was too much. I had decided on the army anyway, so I said no. Well, Sokowsky just misses getting indicted but he makes a ton, goes on to buy a car dealership where he is minting money, just minting money, and I come back from the army and start cutting lawns for that schmuck Aaronson. I missed out. It could have been Sokowsky-Carl Chevrolet and Subaru, that could have been me. Everything would have been different had I had a car dealership. I been waiting here for another chance ever since, but nothing never came. So what I learned is that with screwups like us it only comes around once and when it comes take it. No matter who you have to fuck.”

When the slangy little music for Murder She Wrote came on I told my father I had to leave. He followed me to the door.

“Take the money,” he said.

“Yes, I heard you.”

“You ever hear from her?” he asked quietly.

“Now and then. She’s taken up golf.”

“I’m not surprised,” he said bitterly. “I think her whole life she aspired to golf. She wanted me to join Philmont Country Club, the ritzy Jewish place down Huntingdon Pike. You know what that fucking place costs? Sokowsky belongs there.”

“She tells me to say hello.”

“I don’t want to hear it.”

“I know.”

“The bums are in Dallas next week. They’re going to get killed in Dallas.”

“Are you inviting me?”

“No, I was just saying.”

“’Cause if you’re inviting me.”

“I’m not inviting you. Shut up. I’ll be busy anyway.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. I got a tee-off time at Merion. Tell the bitch I’m taking it up too.”

It was a sad drive out of Hollywood and the suburbs and back into the city. My father was dying but that wasn’t what was sad. I drove right up Broad Street, through the worst parts of North Philadelphia, bombed-out moviehouses, boarded-up stores, congregants of the homeless under elevated train bridges. I drove through Temple University and past the Philadelphia Inquirer building and then right around City Hall, past that building that had been decimated by fire but was still standing, a high-rise shell with plywood for windows, and I felt sad the whole way. It wasn’t my father’s certain future that was upsetting me so, it was the uncertainty of his past. But it had been a good visit; it had clarified things. My father had always been a barometer for me, the rebellions of my youth only mattered in relation to him. He was quiet, so I talked too damn much. He was uncomplaining, so I complained. He wore his hair in a crew cut, mine flowed past my shoulders all through high school. He was a laborer, I became a lawyer. He was poor, I would be rich. But I wouldn’t be rich his way. “Take the money,” he had said, and in those three swift words he had pointed out my direction as clear as a road sign. “Take the money,” he had said, and I would, but not his way. I wanted nothing of my life to be his way.

Jimmy Moore had killed Zack Bissonette. I knew that with as much certainty as my father knew the Eagles were bums. Jimmy had gone to that club looking for Zack Bissonette and when he found him he grabbed a baseball bat from a display on the wall and with it he beat Bissonette senseless, faceless, comatose, beat him to death. Even as I cleaned up the dachshund mess, scrubbed the bloodstains from Tony Baloney’s wooden desktop and leather blotter with Murphy’s Oil, even then I could see it all, the flashing bat, the fury in Jimmy Moore’s face, the blood bubbling as Bissonette breathed through it. And with a little luck I could prove it all happened just like that, too. I knew what it would cost me. Blaine, Cox, Amber and Cox would not be calling. The Bishop brothers would not be calling. My sweet forty-thousand-dollar cut of the Saltz settlement would not be resting gently in my bank account. From affluence to poverty in the blink of an eye.

But all my life I had resented the fact that what I had wished for had not been bestowed upon me. My father had not been rich, the law firms had not been hiring, that slam-bam-in-your-face case had never come walking in my door. I had been waiting too long for someone to give me my share. Enough already of waiting. Jimmy Moore had said America was not about what was bestowed but about what was grabbed, and now I was grabbing. Make no mistake, I still wanted it all, the money, the prestige, the best tables, the best cars, the youngest and prettiest women. But I wouldn’t end up like my father, embittered because the myth of opportunity had not come knocking on my door. By going up against Jimmy Moore I would surely be losing that which was being bestowed upon me by William Prescott, but I didn’t want to be given anything by anybody anymore. What would Clarence Darrow, the greatest trial lawyer of all time, what would Darrow have done in my situation? What would Lincoln have done, or Daniel Webster, or Andrew Hamilton, the first of the great Philadelphia lawyers? They each would have spit in Prescott’s eye and then gone out and taken what was rightfully theirs. They didn’t rely on gifts bestowed, and no longer would I.

So this is what I would do. I would shit on Blaine, Cox, Amber and Cox. I would shit on the Bishop brothers, on CUP, on the goddamn defendants in Saltz v. Metropolitan Investors, on Norvel Goodwin and his bloody calling cards. I would convince Chester Concannon to let me fight for his freedom and then I would take down Jimmy Moore. And in taking down Jimmy Moore I would make a name for myself. I would win the case for Chester Concannon, I’d save his life, I would, and when I did I’d shout it to the press and watch the clients come roaring in. I would seize opportunity by the neck and wring it, oh yes. I would make a name for myself and from my name, and no one else’s, would flow my power and my wealth and all my worldly success. I would make a name for myself, dammit, and in so doing I alone would make my dreams come true.

43

“HOW’S YOUR PASTRAMI, Morris?” I asked.

“Goot,” he mumbled through a mouth full of meat.

“Not too lean, I hope.”

“No, goot,” he said, fighting to swallow so he could snatch another bite.

“You want more coleslaw, maybe?”

With his mouth again full he nodded his head and lifted the top piece of rye bread off his sandwich. I placed a layer of coleslaw over the thickly sliced spiced meat.

“And more Russian dressing?”

He shrugged, but with the top of his sandwich still off I took a knife and slathered the coleslaw with Russian dressing from the little bowl in front of us.

“I hope it’s not too lean,” I said as Morris was in the middle of taking a bite. “I told the lady not too lean.”

Morris nodded at me, his eyes wide in satisfaction, the sandwich still at his mouth.

“Oh, look,” I said. “This is great. Here come our French fries.”

We were in Ben’s Deli, Ben’s Kosher Deli, a block away from Jewelers’ Row in Philadelphia. Ben’s was a long, low restaurant with one aisle down the middle flanked by booths. The walls were painted white and the floor was white linoleum and the leatherette on the booths was dark green and in the back of the store, on two large planks of plywood, like the tablets from Mt. Sinai, was the menu, writ in dark blue on white. Hot pastrami was a specialty, thick slices of meat with dark peppered crusts and veins of fat that melted on the tongue as you chewed. There was also corned beef, roast beef, tuna fish, chicken salad, egg salad, though no cheese or yogurt or ice cream. Ben’s was a flayshig place, which meant that the cholesterol that oozed out on their platters and into your heart came directly from the very muscles of the twice blessed then slaughtered animals as opposed to indirectly, from their milk. Old Hassids sat at the booths yelling at each other in Yiddish, slick young diamond sellers talked out the sides of their mouths as they snapped the complimentary pickles in their teeth, young boys in yarmulkes sat morosely over their egg salad sandwiches and Cokes. Two nuns squinted at the menu on the wall, searching for the toasted cheese sandwiches they had mistakenly stopped in for.

We were in Ben’s because I had a favor to ask Morris and I astutely figured the best time to ask Morris for a favor was when his mouth was full. “Ketchup?” I asked as the waitress spun the plate of thick-cut fries in front of him.

He shook his head no.

“Beer, how about a beer? A beer would go great with this, wouldn’t it?”

Morris, his mouth once again joyously filled with pastrami and coleslaw and rye bread, shook his head vigorously but then stopped all that shaking and shrugged.

“Miss, could we have two beers? Is Heineken all right, Morris?”

He nodded.

“Two Heinekens.”

When the beers came I poured Morris’s into the little water glass she brought with the bottles, making sure the head was a perfect inch thick.

“How’s your lunch, Morris?”

His glass to his lips, he nodded again.

“Take another bite.”

He took another bite.

“I’ve got a favor to ask.”

He fought to finish swallowing what was in his mouth, took a long drink from his beer, and said, “Tell me, Victor, why am I not surprised by this?”

“Because you’re a wise man, Morris.”

“Wise to you, mine freint, and your obvious attempt at bribery. But Morris Kapustin is a righteous man, he cannot be bought by a simple pastrami sandwich on rye. I am not so easily taken as you think, Victor. Please pass the coleslaw. Sometimes when I take a bite it slips right out of the sandwich and pffft, onto mine lap. These paper napkins they give you now, such schlock. They do nothing to protect you from coleslaw. So tell me what you want from Morris.”

“I need to break into an office.”

He stared at me and shook his head. “I am an investigator, not a thief. You want to find a thief, that’s very simple. Go to a prison, any prison, and you will find many thieves. And the funny thing, even in those prisons there are some thieves who are lawyers, do you understand what I am saying, mine freint? But not here will you find a thief, not at this table at Ben’s. Now you’re insulting me now. All of a sudden I don’t want no more your sandwich. Take it away. Take it. It’s like trayf to me now.”

He pushed his plate away from him. There was still almost a quarter of a sandwich left. He looked at me. I looked at him. He looked at the plate and then pulled it back.

“Give me the coleslaw, please,” he said. “Just a pitsel more is all it is needing.”

I refilled his beer glass.

“Thank you,” he said. “Careful there is not too much head. Who wants to be drinking all that shum? It gives gas.”

“I need to break into an office.”

“Again with the office?”

“I have no choice,” I said.

“Okay, Victor. Tell me now what is so important that you have to become a thief and break into some poor shnook’s office. Wait, don’t yet tell me.”

He quickly finished his sandwich and downed the entire glass of beer. He snatched a French fry and ate it in two quick bites. Wiping his mouth with a napkin, he said, “Okay, now. I was hurrying up to finish mine eating so that I wouldn’t lose appetite from what you are going to tell me.”

“I need to break into an office.”

“So I have heard three times already. Whose office, if I may ask?”

“William Prescott’s.”

“The other lawyer on that trial you are losing. Oh, don’t protest like that, I know everything. Mine new friend Herm Finklebaum, he has been watching the trial for me, keeping me up to date on exactly how lousy you are doing.”

“I’m in a difficult position,” I said.

“Herm says you are dropping faster than his mother’s kreplach. I don’t know his mother, never met the poor woman, but I can imagine.”

“I’m in a very difficult position.”

“And breaking into this fellow’s office, it will help? This I want to hear. This will be better than cable.”

“You get cable, Morris?”

“What, I alone in this country, I don’t deserve to watch our favorite movies on TNT? What crime have I committed, Victor, what? Tell me.”

“I just never thought of you sitting back with a beer watching Sports Center.”

“That Berman fellow, he cracks me up. Jewish actually, you know that? I can tell. Such a punim. So tell me why I must to help you commit a felony.”

And so I told him about Concannon and how he wouldn’t let me defend him like he needed to be defended without proof that Jimmy Moore was dumping on him and how I thought that proof was in William Prescott’s office.

“You need proof in black and white to convince this client of yours?” asked Morris incredulously.

“That’s right.”

“And you think that proof is in this office you want to break into?”

“That’s right.”

“Are you sure you won’t find nothing there but bubkes?”

“I think it’s there. Prescott is a very scientific trial lawyer. He checks every argument with focus groups before popping it on a jury. He had a jury survey conducted before the trial and I asked him for it five or six times. Each time he said he would send it right over, but I never got it.”

“And you are sure that is your proof?”

“That’s all I can think of.”

“And let me ask you this, mister felony, mister three to five years if you are caught. Even if you find this sheet and use it to convince this client to fight back at this fellow Moore, what then? Is there something you can do to save him?”

“I think there is,” I said, “but I can’t do it without his consent and I can’t get his consent without some proof.”

“It seems to me, Victor, and this is just mine professional opinion so you don’t have to follow it because what do I know, but it seems to me that you are taking a very big risk to help this client.”

“You don’t know the half of it.”

“I know more than I want to know already by a half, believe me. Is this client of yours, is he worth it?”

“Actually, yes,” I said. “He’s a good man who is being taken advantage of and deserves someone to stand up for him.”

“And that needs to be you?”

“If not me,” I said, “who?”

He paused and ate a French fry and stared at me for a moment. “You’ve been studying Rabbi Hillel maybe?”

I shrugged and nodded with a shy smile, all the while wondering who the heck was Hillel.

“Maybe you have gained a dollop of faith on us after all, Victor. Is it possible?” He ate another French fry and sighed. “So when is it you will be wanting this break-in?” he said finally. “It’s like Watergate, you know, when is it you will be wanting this Watergate break-in to occur?”

“Tonight.”

“Tonight, is that all? It is so good you are leaving yourself so much time to plan. I assume, Victor, knowing you as well as I do, I assume that you have not yet made plans for this Watergate break-in.”

“That’s right.”

“No idea how to do it.”

“That’s right.”

“No keys, no floor plans, nothing, gornisht.”

“Gornisht.”

“Victor, I am sorry, but I can’t help you with this. I’m an old man, a fat man, ask mine wife and she’ll tell you I drink too much, go ahead, ask Rosalie, she’ll tell you. Bump into her in the street, a stranger, and she will tell you I’m a shikker. Mine heart would plotz on you, right there in that fellow’s office, and then where would you be? There was a time, Victor, when I was the man for excitement, the man in love with danger, but that time, Victor, that time ended the very day I got cable.”

“I need you, Morris.”

“I’m very sorry, Victor. I can’t.”

“I don’t know what to do.”

“I can’t help you, Victor. But mine son, little Sheldon, have I mentioned mine son the locksmith? I think, though I am not certain, but I think mine son might be free tonight. He’s very good at these things, mine son. He spent two years in the Israeli army. Two years starving and working off his tochis, like a schmuck, in love with the idea of the Holy Land before he realized not a shekel could he make there. And beside that, for this cloak-and-dagger mishegahs he was trained by the best in the world.”

“By the Mossad?”

“Now you’re insulting me again, Victor. By Morris Kapustin, by me. This is not a way to treat someone whose help you so desperately need.”

“I was hoping for you, Morris. You I trust. Little Sheldon I wouldn’t recognize if I bumped into him in the street.”

“And I appreciate that, Victor, but forget about me. You’ll trust me into mine grave if I let you. Mine son, little Sheldon, he’ll set you up fine. You’ll give him a chance, no?”

“I guess I don’t have a choice.”

“Your enthusiasm, Victor, it brings tears. Now of course, for work such as this we have special rates. Hazardous work like this we have very special rates.”

“As I expected,” I said. “I also need you to look into one other thing for me.”

“Does this too need breaking in?”

“No,” I said with a smile. “This is a perfect job for an alte kocker like yourself.”

“Such word is the one Yiddish word you learn from me?”

“The night of the arson, a cab driver said he saw a limousine pull out from behind Bissonette’s.”

“Yes? So?”

“I want you to find out who in the area rented a black limousine that night and see if you can link up the rentals to anyone in this case.”

“That I can do.”

“I have a hunch.”

“Victor, please. This whole thing about hunches is very overrated. And who will be paying for all these services?”

“I will.”

“I didn’t know you were such a macher.”

“Just do it, Morris.”

“For you, Victor, anything. And I’ll set you up tonight with little Sheldon. Now that all is settled, I have one more question. The strudel at Ben’s, Victor. Have you ever tasted the strudel at Ben’s? Believe me when I tell you this, it is a mechaieh. So maybe you’ll be nice boichick and be ordering me a piece?”

44

I HAD BEEN INSTRUCTED to be at the bar of the Doubletree Hotel at 10:30 P.M. and to wait there for little Sheldon. The Doubletree was a modern cement and glass structure just south of City Hall. The bar there was open and airy, with rows of tiny tables, a ring of circular booths on a riser around the edge, and glass doors looking out at the hookers on Broad Street. A two-man band played on the tiny stage, a short guy in a tux on guitar and a tall good-looking woman singing and playing synthesizer, standards like “I Will Survive” and “Cherish,” the Madonna version, but no one was dancing. As I sat at the bar, waiting for little Sheldon Kapustin to come and get me, I wondered what he would look like. Small, round, a young Morris but maybe skinnier, hopefully skinnier. He would have to be skinnier, having made it through two years in the Israeli army, but it wouldn’t take too many pastrami sandwiches to beef him up again. My image of Sheldon was not exactly comforting, young, small, fat, a computer nerd. “Give him a chance,” Morris had asked and give him a chance I would because I didn’t have much choice, but I hoped giving little Sheldon his chance wouldn’t land me in jail.

Morris had told me to draw up a rough plan of Prescott’s floor and I had, very rough. It was folded in my jacket pocket. Prescott’s office was on the fifty-fifth floor. I wasn’t quite sure how to get up there. I hoped Morris had worked out a plan. I also didn’t know how to get in the office door if it was locked, but Sheldon was a locksmith, so he would have to take care of it, as well as the desk and file cabinets, which might also be locked. And if I couldn’t find the actual document, it would probably be somewhere on the computer, which Sheldon would have to hack his way onto. Already, I realized, I was too dependent on little Sheldon, and if little Sheldon was even only twice what I expected him to be, I would be lost. I ordered a beer while I was waiting and, on a spur, also a gin and tonic. This was not a night to get drunk, but it was a night for calm, natural or chemically induced, so I drank the G &T quickly and then the beer and ordered another of each.

“Mr. Carl?”

I turned around and immediately flinched. Behind me was an enforcer type, big, solid-necked, arms like legs, a real bruiser with curly black hair and a weightlifter’s pinched nose. He wore a hat, a gangster’s fedora raffishly cocked forward. He held a little leather briefcase in his right hand. It was another Raffaello summons and that briefcase, I thought, was a nice touch in the hotel. “What now?” I asked.

“Is there a problem?”

“I’m sick of it, is all. I’m sick of being dragged into cars for little chats with big-time mobsters. I’m sick of being whipsawed in your boss’s little fights with Moore and the feds.” Maybe I had drunk too much, or maybe my renewed resentment was getting the best of me, but it felt fine sounding off against this lug. “Tell your boss I’m busy, that tonight’s not a good night, that if he wants to talk to me he can just call me on the phone like everyone else. Tell him that.”

“I don’t understand, Mr. Carl.”

“Just tell him what I told you to tell him. You don’t need to understand. That’s not what you’re made for, understanding, is it? Brawny boys like you are made for something else. Just tell him.”

“Maybe some other night would be better.”

“Yeah, sure. Tell him to have his girl get in touch with my girl and we’ll set something up. We’ll do lunch. I know an Indian place.”

“I’ll tell him, Mr. Carl, but my father won’t be too happy about it.”

“Your father, huh? Funny,” I said. “I thought you were dead.”

“Not yet. I’ll give Morris the message.”

“So you’re little Sheldon,” I said. I looked him up and down. “Tell me, Sheldon.” It was the first thing that popped into my mind. “Your mother, Rosalie. I don’t mean to be rude, but your mother is she by any chance a big woman?”

“She can be imposing.”

“I bet. I’m sorry, I thought you were someone else. Sit down. Can I get you a drink?”

“A ginger ale.”

I waved down the bartender. “A ginger ale and another beer.”

“Make that two ginger ales,” said not-so-little Sheldon Kapustin. When the sodas came he took his and led me to a booth in the rear, where we sat across from each other.

“Are you drunk, Mr. Carl? I’ll be frank, I’m not going up with you if you’re drunk.”

“I’m not drunk at all,” I said.

“You sounded drunk back there at the bar.”

“Fortified is what I am.”

“Let me see your floor plan.”

I pulled out the sheet of paper on which I had sketched the hallways and offices, as best I could remember, of the fifty-fifth floor of One Liberty Place. In the corner, as big as I remembered it, was Prescott’s office. I had drawn in the couch, the desk, the oblong table. He looked at it for a while.

“Which way is north?” he asked.

“I don’t know.”

“Do you remember the view out the window?”

I closed my eyes and saw the rivers of row-housed streets leading to Veterans Stadium, and catercorner to it the Schuylkill and Franklin Field. “I think this was south and this was west.”

Sheldon nodded and stared for a long time at my little map. The band was playing the theme from Beverly Hills Cop. A waitress came to give us a wooden bowl of tiny pretzel fishes and asked if we were all right and Sheldon said we were. When she left he reached into his briefcase and pulled out what looked to be a road map, but when he unfolded it, one sheaf at a time, it turned out to be a detailed schematic of the fifty-fifth floor.

“How did you get that?”

“My father has friends everywhere. You’d be surprised.”

“I don’t think I’d be surprised by anything about Morris anymore.”

He spun the schematic around. “All right, based on what you are telling me, this is Prescott’s office.”

“That looks right.”

“And this then would be the closest freight elevator.”

“If you say so. I can’t tell.”

“And this here is probably the custodian’s closet. See how it abuts the HVAC system, so they can change filters and do any needed repairs.”

“Okay,” I said, willing to go along.

“And fortunately,” said Sheldon, “the custodian’s closet isn’t but ten yards from the entrance to Prescott’s office.”

The custodian’s closet was small and dank, with the hum from the floor’s HVAC unit pushing vast quantities of air in and out like a giant lung. There wasn’t really enough room for the two of us, but as long as we staggered our breathing we were all right. We were both in overalls, with caps that read “Robinson Cleaners,” all supplied by Sheldon.

It was Sheldon who had picked the lock to the freight elevator and gotten us onto the fifty-fifth floor. I had thought the offices would be quiet, as dead as my office after five o’clock, but it wasn’t dead at all. There were associates still working, secretaries still typing, copy machines still whirring in the distance. This Talbott, Kittredge and Chase was a billable-hour machine and I guess, like the best-oiled machines in the world, there was no reason to shut it down for a silly thing like nightfall. For a moment I wondered if Prescott was still there, hard at work, but Sheldon had called him before we left the Doubletree Hotel bar and he was gone for the day, not at meetings or out to dinner, but gone. Just to be sure the coast was clear, we followed the hallway past Prescott’s closed door and into the custodian’s closet. On the way I had seen light coming from associates’ offices and I feared that maybe one of those hard successes would recognize me. The first office I passed I instinctively glanced into, spying at a desk a woman whom I had fortunately never seen before. “Don’t look,” whispered Sheldon, and thereafter, for the rest of the walk to the closet, though my hackles were raised, I successfully fought not to glance into those productive little offices. When we reached the custodian’s closet beside the heating, ventilation, and air conditioning system on the fifty-fifth floor, Sheldon opened the door and entered and then yanked me inside.

“His door was closed,” I said.

“That’s good. Hopefully it’s locked.”

“Hopefully?”

“So long as it’s locked we know he’s not expecting anyone to use it. If he leaves it unlocked, one of his people might be planning to step in and pick something up.”

He reached into his briefcase, took out a stethoscope, and proceeded to listen through the door.

“Giving it a checkup?” I asked.

He put his finger to his lips and I shut up.

After a long moment he said, “All right, Mr. Carl, you ready?”

“Sure.”

“You just follow me and keep quiet if anyone sees us.”

“Sure.”

“Don’t go wandering around without me.”

“Don’t worry.”

“And take that with you,” he said, pointing to a bucket with a dirty rag laying over the edge.

After a final moment of listening through the stethoscope, he stuffed it in his briefcase and pulled out a clipboard. One deep breath and he was out the door. Bucket and rag in hand, I followed.

Slowly, calmly, we walked down the hall to the office and made our way around the desk used by Prescott’s secretary, Janice. Sheldon tried the knob and it turned. He opened the door. I looked around quickly, saw no one, and scooted inside. Sheldon closed the door behind me and immediately turned on the light. It was as I remembered, the wall of photographs, the gilded desk with piles of papers, the conference table in the middle covered with files, the wraparound couch and grotesque boxing painting and coffee table with papers atop in a neat pile. Behind the desk was the low and long wooden credenza.

“Go to it,” he said.

“Where do I begin?”

“This is your gig, Mr. Carl. Just be quick about it. I don’t like that the door was unlocked.”

The first place I hit was the long conference table in the middle of the room, covered with thick maroon folders packed with documents. There were titles on the folder dividers that let me know these were indeed Moore and Concannon files, but the system was based on numbers with which I wasn’t familiar, so I was forced to search through them one by one. There were transcripts, there was correspondence, which I went through carefully, there were documents from the councilman’s files. Much of this stuff I had seen, on many of the letters I had been copied, but there was also much I had never seen before. I especially concentrated on correspondence between Prescott and Bruce Pierpont, the jury expert. I had hoped a copy of Pierpont’s report would be in the correspondence file, attached to the cover letter, but though the cover letter was there, the report was not. As I searched, Sheldon glanced around Prescott’s desk.

“Anything?” he asked in a worried whispered voice.

“Not yet. Why don’t you check the desk?”

“It’s locked,” he said.

“Well, open it.”

“If someone comes in and I’m fiddling around inside his locked desk, that’s trouble.”

“If someone comes in we’re in trouble anyway.”

He looked doubtful and then pulled his picks out of his pocket and went to work on the desk’s lock. It yielded to him in less than a minute.

Though I wasn’t finding the jury report I had come for, I was learning much I hadn’t known. There was a bill from Bissonette to Moore for money owed for club expenditures. There was also a stack of bank receipts showing a series of cash deposits to Veronica’s checking account, all in the high four figures but none for more than ten thousand dollars. And then I found a file, number 716, which stopped me cold.

Inside was a copy of the Martindale-Hubbell report on Guthrie, Derringer and Carl. Inside was a copy of my law school transcript and the pathetic letter I had sent off seven years before seeking a job at Talbott, Kittredge and Chase. Inside was a copy of my apartment lease, a copy of my car insurance application, listing my father’s address as my own to get the reduced suburban rate, a list of all transactions for the last two years on my credit card, copies of my bank statements, copies of my delinquent payment statements from the Student Loan Marketing Association, a copy of my deficient credit report. And then, sitting there like a ghost from my past, a transcript of my deposition of Mrs. Osbourne. I paged through it quickly. One section was highlighted in orange.

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

A: No.

Q: Let me show you a picture. I’ll mark this P. 13.

A: What is this? This is a brochure of some sort.

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

A: Tiffany LeGrand?

Q: Oh, so you do know her.

A: (no response)

So my ability to be bought wasn’t writ large on my face after all. It was documented in my paper trail, in all of my records, in each step I had taken in the shallow depths of my past. The sum total of my years, the ledgers of my true worth were in that file, all I had wanted, how low I would stoop to get it, how little I had achieved no matter how low I stooped. My chest ached at the very thought of it. I put it down carefully, as if it were a fragile flask filled with the vilest of liquids.

I turned away from the table in disgust. “Anything in the desk?” I asked Sheldon.

“Not yet, just firm memos, phone bills.”

“We’re looking for a jury report, or anything marked Attorney Work Product over the top. I’m going to check the credenza.”

The credenza behind the desk was wooden, a piece of fine furniture really, low like a table. One wooden door, the length of the piece, swung up, revealing files arranged horizontally. Kneeling down, I started going through the files one by one. I hurriedly determined the subject matter of each, checking file tabs, looking inside to make sure the papers corresponded to the tabs, and then moving on. I was finding nothing, and growing frustrated, when the office door opened and I heard a gasp from the woman who entered.

“What?” she shouted, “What are you doing here?” and from the tenor of the voice and its unrestrained hostility I recognized its bearer right off. It was Madeline Burroughs, Prescott’s drone, who held in her well-hidden breast a deep hatred of me. I kept my head down and froze, not turning around as she spoke.

“Cleaning crew, ma’am,” said Sheldon.

“Cleaning crew left three hours ago.”

“I’m a supervisor. We’ve been getting complaints about the work, so we’re checking up on the crew.”

“What are you doing at the desk?”

“Checking for vermin,” said Sheldon. “They got them like crazy on fifty-three.”

“I’ve never seen any insects up here,” said Madeline. “I don’t believe you. Stay right there, I’m calling Security.”

“That’s all right with us,” said Sheldon calmly. “But they’re all throughout this desk. That’s why the guy left us the desk keys, to check.”

“Mr. Prescott left you his keys?”

“I don’t know who he is.” There was a rustle of papers from inside a desk drawer and then I heard Sheldon say, “Here’s one.”

“Oh, God,” said Madeline.

“Oops, sorry,” said Sheldon. “They’re slippery little things.”

I turned around slowly, my head down so that, from beneath my visor, I could see only the carpet. A huge roach was rushing right toward a sturdy pair of blue pumps.

“Let me get that,” said Sheldon.

The pumps took a step back and then, as the cockroach approached, the right pump lifted and squashed it. The bug’s shell crunched like a potato chip and the innards squished out.

“We’re going to have to come back and spray,” said Sheldon.

“I think so,” said Madeline.

“Anything you wanted to get?”

“It’ll wait,” she said as the pumps spun around and stepped out of the office, the door closing behind them.

Sheldon stepped over to pick up the summarily executed roach.

“Jesus,” I said. “Where did that come from?”

“My pocket,” said Sheldon. “Now hurry up and let’s get out of here before she figures out what I might have done and decides to call Security after all.”

I turned back to the credenza and rushed through the remaining files. Nothing. I went to the desk and rifled the papers in piles on top. Nothing. I went through the drawers, quickly, looking for anything. Nothing. I went back to the table and searched again through the stretched maroon files. I was going through them haphazardly now, desperate from nearly getting caught by Madeline Burroughs, desperate to get out of there, but even more desperate to find my proof for Concannon.

“We have to go,” said Sheldon.

“Look through the desk once more,” I said. “We’re looking for anything by Bruce Pierpont.”

Sheldon once again went through the desk. I kept reviewing the files on the table. I pulled the sheaves of papers bound in those files to check them. There were transcripts from the trial, from the grand jury, accountants’ reports on CUP finances, but nothing by Pierpont.

“Well, here’s something interesting,” said Sheldon.

“The report?”

“No.”

“Forget it, then. Try the computer.”

“Not enough time,” said Sheldon. “We have to go.”

“One last look,” I said.

“No.”

He closed the desk drawers and fiddled with the locks. Then he stepped over to pull me away.

“Okay, all right. Just let me straighten up.” I rearranged the files on the table to approximate the way they were when we got there. As I followed him to the door I spied the small pile of papers on the coffee table by the couch. An old Edgar Allan Poe story somersaulted into my mind.

“Wait one second.”

“We can’t,” said Sheldon, but we did, as I leafed quickly through the pile. It was a mishmash of things, letters from other cases, advertisements for continuing legal education courses. And then near the bottom, covered with clear plastic, bound with a thin black fastener, about a quarter of an inch thick, was a report by Bruce J. Pierpont, Ph.D., entitled: A Statistical Analysis by Demographic Sector of Community Views on Certain Specific Arguments to Be Presented in the Case of the United States v. Moore and Concannon. Got you, you bastard.

I rolled up the report tightly and stuck it into the back pocket of my overalls. “Let’s get out of here,” I said unnecessarily, as Sheldon was already out the door.

As we walked quickly for the exit and the elevator we heard the sound of a group coming toward us. Sheldon grabbed my shoulder and we turned and ran, ducking into the custodian’s closet before anyone could see us. Sheldon locked the door. We waited there for almost an hour, terrified, waiting as Security came and went and Madeline told her story to an associate here and a secretary there and then, on a secretary’s phone, to Prescott. When Sheldon’s stethoscope told us the field was clear, we ducked out silently but with pace.

On the way down in the freight elevator I asked Sheldon what he had found in the desk that had interested him so.

“Just a phone bill.”

“So?”

“Well, there had been a series of collect calls from a number in area code 512.”

“Area code 512?”

“Right, which includes Corpus Christi, Texas.”

“Okay, calls from Corpus Christi.”

“Well, Morris told me that this Prescott was involved in your case with Stocker. We had tracked Stocker to somewhere on the Gulf of Mexico. Last time I checked the map, Corpus Christi was right there on the Gulf of Mexico.”

“You think he’s there?”

Sheldon shrugged. “Who knows? It doesn’t matter, though, since Morris told me the time limit had passed for the case.”

“Did you take the bill?”

“No, you told me to forget it.”

“Jesus, Sheldon. I wish you had taken the damn bill. If we could link Prescott to Stocker it could be worth millions.”

“So if I had taken the bill, you would have hired us again to check out if Stocker was the fellow Prescott was talking to in Corpus Christi.”

“In a heartbeat, yeah.”

“At special rates, of course, being that Corpus Christi is halfway across the country.”

“Sure, you could have charged your special rates.”

“That’s interesting,” he said, staring up at the descending numbers lighting atop the elevator doors. “Because although I didn’t take the bill, I just happen to have memorized the number.”

“Little Sheldon,” I said, shaking my head. “When I first met you I couldn’t imagine anyone looking more different than your father. But all of a sudden I see the resemblance.”

45

“GOOD MORNING, VICTOR,” said Prescott to me the next day as I set my briefcase on the defense table.

“Good morning, Mr. Prescott,” I said.

Prescott had been presenting his case for a number of days now, witnesses testifying about the absolute need for money to run and win political campaigns, witnesses testifying as to the good works CUP was performing in the community, Mrs. Diaz testifying as to the crucial ministrations being given at the Nadine Moore Youth Center and the councilman’s ambition for a great bloom of healing. Today, I assumed, would be more of the same and I assumed right.

“Most of this session will be spent on character witnesses for the councilman,” said Prescott. “Political allies, community members whom he has helped. That sort of thing. Eggert was willing to stipulate to much of the testimony, but I thought the jury should be able to hear the full quantity of community support for Jimmy Moore.”

“That sounds fine,” I said. “I might have a few questions for some of the witnesses myself.”

“Oh, I don’t think so, Victor,” said Prescott. “I think you won’t have any questions for these witnesses. And when the councilman testifies tomorrow you won’t have any questions either. Talk it over with your client.”

“You know I will, sir.”

“Splendid,” he said.

Prescott’s first witness of the morning was the Reverend James T. McHenry, pastor at the 57th Street Baptist Church of Divine Revelation. The reverend was a tall African-American with a narrow face accented by sharp cheekbones. He wore a flowered tie knotted thick as an ascot and he spoke in beautiful rhythms, as if he were up high on an altar, standing before a gospel choir, preaching. He had known Jimmy Moore for twenty years, he announced from the witness stand, and for much of that time they had been political opponents. But in the last five years, since the death of the councilman’s daughter, they had been marching together, ever forward in the struggle for dignity and human rights in this great city. Jimmy Moore had helped him get the funds to finish renovation of the church. Jimmy Moore had been a crusader in saving the children in his community, had been the scourge of drug dealers and healer of the drug dependent. He knew Jimmy Moore to be a fine man, a caring man, a family man who looked out for his God, his community, and his family before looking out for himself. Jimmy Moore, in the crucible of his personal tragedy, had become a great man, a fighter for righteousness who would never do anything to hurt his city or its people.

“What is your opinion, Reverend McHenry,” asked Prescott, in the archaic way required by the Federal Rules to elicit character testimony, “of Jimmy Moore’s reputation as a truthful and honest citizen?”

“The Jimmy Moore I have worked with so closely lo these many years is as honest as Moses, as truthful as a saint, a God-fearing man who follows all the Lord’s commandments, including the prohibition against bearing false witness.”

“Objection,” said Eggert. “The reference to God is inappropriate.”

“God has no place in a court of law?” asked Prescott with false incredulity. “Isn’t that a Bible we swear on before we testify?”

“Sustained,” said the judge. “Reverend, please just answer the questions.”

“Reverend McHenry,” continued Prescott, “what is your opinion of Jimmy Moore’s reputation as a peaceful citizen?”

“I have worked side by side with Jimmy Moore to rid the streets of the scourge of drugs, I know all the good he is capable of, and I know in my heart that he is a peaceful man with the gentleness of an angel.”

“And what is your opinion, Reverend McHenry, of Jimmy Moore’s reputation as a law-abiding citizen?”

“I’ll repeat it, sir. Jimmy Moore is a man, sir, a man above reproach. A man who can look his family, his community, and his God, sir, his God straight in the eye so that all will know he is a righteous, law-abiding man.”

Eggert threw up his hands at the last response but stayed quiet.

“No further questions,” said Prescott.

“Mr. Carl,” said Judge Gimbel without looking up from his daily paperwork, “I assume you have no questions for the Reverend.”

I stood up. “Just a few, Your Honor.” The judge raised his head and looked at me gravely and then nodded. I could feel Prescott’s eyes staring me down from the other side of the table. I buttoned my jacket and strolled to the podium, but before I could speak Prescott was objecting.

“Can we come to sidebar, Your Honor?” he asked.

“If you must,” said Judge Gimbel, and all the lawyers huddled with the judge out of earshot of the jury and the witness.

“Your Honor,” said Prescott. “I don’t believe Mr. Carl’s intended cross is in conformity with his client’s wishes. I believe it is Mr. Concannon’s desire that he not cross-examine this witness and it is improper for Mr. Carl, therefore, to conduct this examination.”

“Mr. Carl?” asked the judge.

“Mr. Prescott represents Councilman Moore,” I said. “I don’t understand how he can presume to speak for my client.”

“Generally, Mr. Prescott,” said the judge, “I assume a lawyer’s strategy is in conformity with his client’s wishes. Is there any reason why I shouldn’t assume that here?”

“Yes, sir. I can guarantee that this is not the case here. Absolutely, and Mr. Carl’s disregard of his client’s wishes is going to be prejudicial to my client as well as to his own. I believe you should bring up Mr. Concannon and ask him.”

“That’s improper,” I said with as much indignation as I could raise.

“How good is your authority as to Mr. Concannon’s wishes, counselor?”

“Ironclad, Judge,” said Prescott. “He confirmed his desires to Councilman Moore just last night.”

“Last night?” asked the judge.

“Yes, sir, which means Mr. Carl is acting without authority.”

“That’s a pretty grave accusation, Mr. Prescott,” said the judge.

“Yes, sir.”

“If you’re right, I’ll have to notify the bar association as to Mr. Carl’s conduct. If you’re wrong, that makes this objection an improper tactic and I’ll have to notify the bar association as to your conduct. Now do you want to pursue this further?”

“Yes, sir,” said Prescott, and he slipped a little smile at me.

“Mr. Concannon,” said the judge to the defense table. “Will you step up here, please?”

Concannon stood up from the defense table and walked toward us. At the same time, Prescott motioned for Jimmy Moore to come up too, so the two men walked side by side to our little klatch. Chester was walking with his head high, his shoulders straight, seeming not to notice the way Jimmy was staring at him.

“Mr. Concannon,” said the judge when the two men had arrived. “The question has been raised as to whether or not you have agreed to your lawyer’s questioning of this witness and generally participating in this trial on a more than pro forma basis. Without getting into any conversation between your lawyer and yourself, I am going to ask you a question and I would like only a yes or no answer. Now, Mr. Concannon, yes or no, do you consent to your lawyer’s questioning of this witness?”

All eyes were on Chester, Jimmy especially was staring hard, leaning forward, his jaw thrust out, his head shaking back and forth just slightly, but enough to let Chester know exactly what he wanted to hear.

“Victor has my complete confidence,” said Chester in a clear voice. “He has my consent to ask any question he seeks fit to ask.”

Prescott twitched when Concannon gave his answer. It was only a slight twitch, a sudden contraction of the corner of his mouth, nothing more than that, but there it was. It brought a joy to my heart that is indescribable. A mechaieh, Morris would have called it.

“Fine,” said the judge. “Mr. Prescott, I will be sending a report to the bar association immediately after today’s session. Mr. Carl, you may continue.”

“You’re betraying me,” Jimmy growled at Chester.

“Quiet,” said the judge.

“After all I’ve done for you,” shouted Jimmy for all to hear, including the jury. “You were in the gutter when I found you.”

“Mr. Prescott,” said the judge. “Restrain your client or I’ll hold him in contempt.”

Prescott grabbed hold of Jimmy’s arm, but Jimmy was already in Chester’s face, their noses not five inches apart. “You’re stabbing me in the back, you ungrateful bastard,” said Jimmy Moore.

“Go to hell, Councilman,” said Chester. “And maybe we’ll room together there.”

I understood exactly where Concannon’s anger was coming from. Before dawn I had been at his apartment, delivering for his perusal A Statistical Analysis by Demographic Sector of Community Views on Certain Specific Arguments to Be Presented in the Case of the United States v. Moore and Concannon. The report was written in an obscure technojargon that could only have been invented by a group of Ph.D.s trying to give their bullshit profession the appearance of validity, but even all that jargon couldn’t obscure that Pierpont’s report was a blueprint for screwing Chester Concannon to the wall.

“It’s all there, Chet,” I had said, pacing back and forth as I spoke. “What jurors to pick, what voir dire to ask, how to present evidence, how to argue, it’s all there. The report gives a scientifically designed method for convincing the jury that Jimmy Moore was betrayed by a greedy subordinate who was interested only in taking as much as he could grab hold of, the politics be damned. He’s going to climb out of this mess on your back, Chet, leaving you struggling for breath in the deep shit. He is letting you take his fall.”

“He’s not going to do that to me,” he said wearily.

“Yes, he is. He’s been doing it all along. He told me so himself. And Chester?”

He looked up at me.

“You know it. You’ve known it from the first.”

Chester didn’t give me an answer right then. He needed to think about it, he said. He was in a silk robe. From the bedroom a sweet, drowsy voice had asked, “Is everything all right, baby?” But everything wasn’t all right. I hadn’t even asked him his decision before I stood to examine the preacher, but I didn’t doubt what he would do. Chet’s greatest trait was his loyalty, and the one thing loyalty can never abide is betrayal.

“That’s enough from both of you,” said the judge, with steel in his grating voice. “Another word and you’ll both be in contempt. You may continue, Mr. Carl. And Mr. Carl.”

“Yes, Your Honor.”

“It’s good to see you back from the dead.”

“Thank you, sir,” I said.

When the warring parties had been seated and I was back at the podium, I stood very straight and stared directly into the witness’s eyes until he squirmed just a bit. Then I started.

“Now, Reverend, you testified that you believe Councilman Moore to be a righteous man, an adherent to the laws of God and man both.”

“That’s right, sir,” he answered.

“Now tell me, Reverend, you’ve met the councilman’s wife.”

“Yes, sir. Leslie Moore is a lovely woman.”

“What about his mistress, Reverend, have you met his mistress?”

Prescott leaped to his feet and bellowed his objection.

Judge Gimbel waved us to the bench, leaned forward, and said in a low rasping voice, “Explain yourself, Mr. Carl.”

“Last I heard, Your Honor,” I said calmly, “adultery was a violation of both God’s law and the penal code. Now the reverend has testified as to his opinion of the councilman’s law-abiding character as well as his adherence to God’s law. I am now entitled to ask questions about that opinion, as well as to inquire on specific instances of the councilman’s conduct. Rule 405(a) of the Federal Rules of Evidence allows this precise question.”

“Rule 405(a)?” asked Judge Gimbel. He snapped at his clerk and a leatherbound volume was immediately brought to him. He licked his thumb and paged through the book. “Rule 405(a), Rule 405(a). Here it is, Rule 405(a). Hmmmmm.” He slammed the book shut. “Yes, all right, I’ll allow it. Objection overruled.”

“But Your Honor,” protested Prescott. “This is far beyond anything relevant to the crime charged.”

“That’s enough, Mr. Prescott. You opened the door, so now don’t be surprised when Mr. Carl marches through it. Read your rules before you call your next witness.”

“But Judge…”

“It’s Rule… What rule is it, Mr. Carl?”

“Rule 405(a), Your Honor.”

“Precisely. Now go back to your seat and sit down, Mr. Prescott. You can ask your question, Mr. Carl.”

“Thank you, sir.”

I stepped back to the podium and stared sweetly at the jurors as I said, “Now, Reverend, I’ll repeat the question. Have you ever met Councilman Moore’s mistress?”

The reverend hesitated just enough so that the whole courtroom knew he was lying and then said, “No.”

I turned my attention to him sharply. “You’re under oath now, sir,” I said. “You have sworn on the Bible to speak only the truth. Are you telling me you have never met Veronica Ashland?”

The reverend looked nervously at Jimmy, at the judge, and then said, “I have been introduced to Miss Ashland.”

“Pretty woman, isn’t she?”

“My my, yes.” He paused for a second and involuntarily licked his lips. “As are all God’s creatures,” he added.

“And you knew that Miss Ashland was Jimmy Moore’s mistress.”

“I had been told that, yes,” said the reverend.

“Objection, hearsay,” shouted Prescott.

“Sustained, answer is stricken.”

“How did Councilman Moore introduce her to you, Reverend?” I asked.

“As a dear friend.”

“But you knew that to mean mistress?”

“Well, sir, the councilman is a very passionate man.”

“That means you knew her to be his mistress.”

The reverend looked at Jimmy with pleading eyes and then said, “That’s what I assumed.”

“Now you’ve been with the councilman on one or two of his evenings out with his limousine and Miss Ashland, haven’t you?” I glanced over at Chet and the reverend followed my gaze and knew immediately all that I knew.

Staring at Chester, he said, “Yes, that’s right.”

“You drank champagne with the councilman and Miss Ashland.”

“That’s right.”

“Good champagne, right? The best.”

“I don’t remember the quality of the champagne.”

“And the councilman paid for everything, isn’t that right?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well, you didn’t pay, did you, Reverend?”

“No, sir. The pulpit is not a place for prosperity.”

“Are you aware, Reverend, that the councilman met Miss Ashland, his mistress, at a crack house?”

Prescott leaped again to his feet as the murmuring rose. “I object, Your Honor. This is pure slander.”

“Mr. Carl,” said the judge, “is there a good faith basis for that question?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Proceed.”

“Answer the question, Reverend. Were you aware of that?”

“No, I wasn’t.”

“Are you aware that the councilman has put Miss Ashland up in a luxury apartment in Olde City with a sweetheart lease at far below market value?”

“No, sir.”

“Are you aware that during this trial he has slipped up to that apartment numerous times to visit late into the night with his mistress, Veronica Ashland?”

“No, sir, I was not.”

“Now, sir, adultery is against God’s law, is it not?”

“Yes. That is one of the Ten Commandments handed down to Moses on Mt. Sinai.”

“One of the big ten of God’s laws, isn’t that right?”

“You could say that it is one of the big ten, yes.”

“Like the prohibition against bearing false witness.”

“Yes.”

“And the Sixth Commandment is also one of the big ten, isn’t that right?”

“Yes sir, it is right there in Exodus, chapter 20, verse 13. ‘Thou shalt not murder.’”

“And someone who has so easily violated one of the Ten Commandments might just as easily violate another.”

“I can’t say that for certain.”

“But all of God’s laws are equally vital. I mean, you don’t preach it’s okay to violate some of the Ten Commandments and not others. You don’t preach, go ahead and steal, just don’t take the Lord’s name in vain, now do you?”

“No, sir, it is all God’s law.”

“And both adultery and murder, along with being against God’s law, are also against the secular law, isn’t that so?”

“I am not a lawyer, sir.”

“Good for you, Reverend, that puts you one up on the rest of us here. I have no further questions.”

As I walked back to my seat I had a panoramic view of the defense table. Chester was sitting calmly, his hands clasped before him on the table, looking straight so as to avoid Jimmy’s stare. Jimmy’s face was dark with anger, his facial muscles moving like stung slugs beneath his skin. Prescott was in a desperate conference with two of his associates.

The battle had been joined.

Just before I sat down I noticed someone leaving the courtroom. It was Moore’s wife, Leslie, head high, posture erect, rushing out of there as fast as she could go.

46

THE FISTFIGHT STARTED in the men’s room before spilling into the hallway. U.S. marshals, stiff and heavy, ears plugged, blazers flapping, lumbered over to break it up, but the ferocity of the combatants kept them at bay. Jimmy Moore had hold of Chet Concannon’s neck. Chester held tight to Jimmy Moore’s crotch. Their shoes slipped on the smooth tile floor as they struggled in silence. With their free arms they were flailing, one at the other, like hockey players. Chester landed a few mighty hooks into Jimmy’s stomach and then Jimmy butted him, a brutal contraction of the arm that left Jimmy dazedly swirling away and Chet bleeding in sheets down his forehead even as he maintained his death grip on Jimmy’s crotch. A photographer’s flash popped like a firecracker. The picture landed on the front page of the Daily News under the headline COURT HALL BRAWL.

After the judge had dismissed the jury early for the day, once again admonishing them not to read the newspapers, and after he issued contempt citations, fining Chester and Jimmy each five hundred dollars and threatening both with jail if anything like that happened again for the rest of the trial, and after the bloodied Chester Concannon headed home in a taxi and the bowed Jimmy Moore stepped out of the courthouse bent over double, as if he had eaten a bad piece of pork, Prescott slipped beside me on the courthouse steps.

“Your client has been fired from the councilman’s staff,” said Prescott.

“Evidently,” I said. “But it was only a matter of time.”

“That’s right,” said Prescott. “Only for as long as the loyalty shown by my client to a subordinate would continue to impress the jury and keep Concannon in line at the same time. There’s no need for it now. It is my understanding that Concannon somehow obtained a copy of our expert’s jury survey.”

“You mean the one you had promised repeatedly to send me but never did?”

“Precisely. It is what Chester told Jimmy before their little burlesque broke out. How did he get a copy of it, hmmm? Do you know?”

“I gave it to him.”

“How did you get it, Victor?”

I shrugged. “I have my sources, Billy.”

He put his arm around my shoulders and squeezed hard enough for me to hear a crack. Looking the other way he said, “Don’t call me Billy again or I’ll snap you in two. There was a break-in at my office last night. Nothing was missing except that report. I requested the entire office be dusted for fingerprints. You wouldn’t mind giving us a sample of yours, would you?”

“I would, actually,” I said. “On principle, you understand.”

He let go of me. Like an injured ballplayer, I restrained from rubbing my shoulder.

Prescott said, “You really stepped in it today, Victor.”

“The day I stepped in it was that first afternoon when I walked into your office.”

“I would have thought you’d be grateful,” he said. “You were a nothing and I gave you the opportunity to be a something.”

“The opportunity to play your dupe.”

“Really now, Victor. What other role could you play? I’m very disappointed in you.”

“I am crushed,” I said.

“Yes, that’s right. I am going to crush you. You know of course that CUP is very dissatisfied with your personal attack on their chairman.”

“I assumed they would be.”

“They’ve forbidden Blaine, Cox to even think of hiring you.”

“I don’t need their stinking job,” I said with my best bandito accent, but it came out wrong, like a whine.

“And of course they’ll dispute your fees now.”

“I’ll get paid. I’m a lawyer. I’ll sue them if I don’t get paid. That’s what lawyers do.”

“Any judge will see the conflict of interest. How could you have expected CUP to pay for Concannon’s defense when his strategy at the trial is to betray CUP’s chairman? In fact, they have told me they are going to sue you for the retainer.”

“Good luck to them finding it. I’ve got nothing but debts.”

“Yes, we know. But still, judgments can be inconvenient things.”

I thought of Winston Osbourne and his sad overgrown fingernails. My eyes were involuntarily watering now. It was one thing to anticipate the firestorm, it was another to be in the middle of it. I turned away from him so he wouldn’t see tears. Across the steps I saw Chuckie Lamb staring at us, something strange and open in his face. He saw me looking at him and he smiled as Prescott dressed me down, but it must have been an off day for Chuckie because the normal quantum of malice in his smile was missing.

“The Bishop brothers have already begun to look for other counsel on the Valley Hunt Estates deal,” continued Prescott. “And my clients in the Saltz case have withdrawn their offer. Permanently. Trial is scheduled in two weeks.”

“We’ll be ready.”

“Ready to lose. You have stepped in it today, my friend, yes you have. Eye deep.”

He started walking down the steps, away from me, and then he stopped and turned. “After today, Victor, your career is dead. Gone. It has sunk from the weight of your foolishness. After today you might just as well go back to living in that crumbling house with that bitter old man, spending your days cutting lawns.”

Prescott’s lawn-cutting remark sent me to the bar. I found a place just a few blocks from the courthouse, a bar called Sneakers, and I figured it was a sports bar, but whatever it was I didn’t care. It was empty when I went in, dark, the mashy sour smell of beer, like a frat house the morning after. There was music playing, some throaty folksinger turned up too loud. The bartender was a pretty woman with a pug nose and freckles and a boyish haircut. I asked for a Sea Breeze. She looked at me funny and I shrugged and told her to send over a vodka martini while she was at it. When the drinks came I downed the martini with a quick snap and chased it with the Sea Breeze, and although the combination didn’t quite send me off to a tropical paradise as I had hoped it was fine enough for me to order another round.

So Prescott had learned even more than what was in the sad sheaf of papers in file 716. He had researched my lowly family history, my father’s lofty profession, he had spoken to my acquaintances, my friends, to Guthrie, that bastard. And of course there would have been the chats over lunch with his prep school mate Winston Osbourne, Prescott getting the lowdown on the greedy second-rater who had hounded poor Winston into desperation. How pathetic that even in his decrepitude, with his fingernails long and his hair stringy, Winston Osbourne was still more welcome at the club than I. But of course he was of noble blood, scion of the Bryn Mawr Osbournes, and so it was squarely within the finest and oldest traditions of his people for Osbourne to lunch at the club with Prescott and plot against the Jew. And then Prescott, after researching the whole of my life, after drawing a detailed psychological portrait, after reviewing his information with the best minds of Talbott, Kittredge and Chase, after all that Prescott had decided to hire me, knowing, knowing that I would sell out. Was my weakness that palpable? Well, at least the bastard had me wrong, but at that moment, sipping the Sea Breeze, watching the pretty bartender make up my next round, at that moment I wished he had been right.

It was the flip side of the lawn-cutting remark that was killing me. Prescott was right. My career, in all probability, was dead. Beth had jumped a sinking ship and none too soon. Well, good for her. I mean, who was I to think that I could pull off something as audacious as this? I didn’t have the power or the skill or the balls for it. I had chosen to take the opposite tack of my father and, with the inevitability of farce, that choice would lead me right back to the dark crumbling bungalow in Hollywood, Pennsylvania, or someplace very much like it, where I would spend my life sitting alone in a big faded chair, watching TV, hacking my lungs out into a paper towel, cursing myself for what might have been. I was not made for noble sacrifice or for the hard work of self-making. Let the Philip Marlowes of the world sit in sad satisfaction of their nobility. I didn’t want to be noble anymore, I wanted to be somebody, and for guys like me it was one or the other.

The bartender placed the drinks in front of me and I smiled at her. I took a sip of the martini, letting out a sigh when I was finished.

“Woman trouble,” she said to me with a knowing smile.

“How could you tell?”

“We get that a lot around here.”

“I bet you do,” I said.

Veronica and her whippet body and her thrilling insatiability. I took a gulp of the Sea Breeze. I had never before met anyone like Veronica, she had taken me someplace I didn’t know I could ever find. What had I meant when I said I loved her? What was the nugget that still lay in my chest? I had never felt about anyone else what I felt about her, but was that love? It was more like a thirst, a deep desperate thirst. I took another gulp and felt it even more strongly. I wondered whether Tony Baloney might have been wrong about everything, whether I might have jumped to the wrong conclusions, but even as I let my mind play with the thought I knew better. The cash withdrawals, the way she grew more harried as the evening aged, her kicking me out of bed every night so she could take care of her other needs in private. The wild greasy smell of her hair as she let herself go. She had told me half her story and I could figure out the rest. She had been hooked in Pakistan, cleaned up in Philadelphia by Jimmy, hooked again somewhere, and I was pretty certain where. There was a weakness to Veronica, a softness where she needed to be steel. You could see it in the way she drank, in the way she screwed. There was a need for indulgence that could never be satisfied, no matter how hard she tried. I figured she was up there now, in her apartment, desperately trying to figure out what to do. Jimmy, I’m sure, had called, warned her about what was happening. She was fluttering around her apartment now like a trapped bird. But I had something for her, something that would settle her down. I just needed a few more drinks to get up the courage to slip it to her.

Two women came in, nice looking, sharp-eyed women, women with faces that said they cared about politics and literature and saw the latest movies. That’s what I needed, someone to bring me back into the world, someone like Beth. We could go to plays, the ball game, discuss the President and the budget and the Middle East. We could curse out Newt Gingrich together. Life would be just so grand. Veronica was not of this world, she was of her own. There was something sad and lost about her, something unconcerned. Maybe it was the accident outside Isfahan she had told me about, the van twisting down the slope, the fragility of life pressing itself over her face like a damp, smelly pillow. It was enough to drive anyone out of the present and that was precisely what it had done to her. But I wasn’t going to follow anymore.

I waved at the bartender and she placed two more drinks before me. I was getting drunk and it felt good. Another woman walked in and eyed the place. She was heavy, dressed in jeans and flannel shirt, but with a nice ponytail. I always thought ponytails were sexy. Like back in high school, well, not my high school, Archie’s high school. Ponytailed and overweight, what more could I want? She would keep me rooted, I thought. A ton of fun, yes. Someone like her. Jesus, I was drinking too much, but it felt so good. What the hell? It was a Tuesday, no court for another thirteen hours, plenty of time to prepare my cross-examination of Jimmy Moore. He was to be called tomorrow to testify in his own defense and he would bury Concannon. And what could I do about it? Gornisht. That was what was so sad about the whole thing. Even as I gave up everything I ever wanted, it wasn’t going to do Chester a bit of good, it wasn’t going to make the kind of name I needed to make for myself. Clients don’t come roaring in to losers. Maybe I could call Prescott, tell him I was sorry, that I would go along, but to give that prick a victory, shit, I’d shoot him first.

Two women came into the bar with matching black leather jackets. Epaulets, belts hanging, zippers on the sleeves. Yes, tie me up with those jackets, wind the sleeves around my chest. One was pretty, one was not, I didn’t care anymore. Tie me up with your leather, sweetheart, bind my arms and legs, flagellate, flagellate, dance to the music, tie me up and I’m yours. I downed the martini in front of me. What was that, my third, fourth? And then the Sea Breezes on top of them. Maybe Veronica was waiting for me, maybe she had been calling. I could use it tonight, yes. A few kisses, a few tweaks of those gorgeous nipples, and then slip it to her, that would be something.

One of the black leather jackets sat down at the bar beside me. My poor luck was holding, it wasn’t the pretty one. She was thin, angular, her chin sharp, her hair like a sloppy Dorothy Hamill. And what was that on her cheek, that thin white line? It was a scar. Oh, God, now that was sexy. Maybe my luck was changing, a leatherclad vixen with a scar on her cheek.

She leaned on the bar and faced me. “Enjoying the view?”

A line, I thought. What I needed to do was to give her a line. My thinking had grown thick, but I could come up with a line, at least. “It’s fine,” I said. “It just got better.”

“Well, that’s good,” she said bitterly. “We just love to provide an evening’s entertainment.”

What had I done now, I wondered. I didn’t understand what she was saying. Maybe she was for sale, but if so she was a strange looking hooker.

The bartender came over. “Back off, Sharon, we’ve talked about this before.”

“I’m just sick of the gawkers,” said Sharon.

“That’s not why he’s here.”

“Then tell me, J.J., what is he doing here?”

“He came in for a drink. I can tell the ones who are here to look.”

It dawned on me then. It came close to clarity, a thought just hovering out of reach, and then slammed into me.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I thought it was a sports bar.”

“You got to change that name,” said Sharon as she slid away from me.

“I was wondering where the televisions were,” I said.

“Let me get you another round on the house,” said J.J.

“Maybe I should get going.”

“There’s no rush. Sharon’s just a bitch sometimes but basically she’s all right.”

So I had another round and by the end of it the place was spinning and I couldn’t focus on anyone enough to gawk and so Sharon was finally safe from my gaze. The place filled up quickly, it was Tuesday night after all, and I watched them all as they came in. There were younger women and older women and pretty pretty women and ugly women and fat and fatter and skinny women. There were all kinds of women and for some reason, the drinks probably or the secret knowledge I had or some typical male perversion forcing its way to the surface, but for some reason I found them amazingly sexy. I wanted to date them all, to make love to them all, to each of them become a friend and confidant. I was in love with the whole damn room, J.J. especially, with her cute pug nose and freckles. Even Sharon with that scar, yes, I wanted her too. Every damn dyke there I wanted so much it hurt. Hell is being surrounded by all that you want without any possibility of getting it: hell is pure wanting without satisfaction. Hell was being in that bar, in love with the unobtainable. Hell was my life.

Enough with the self-pity already; I had things that needed doing. I slipped off my stool and crawled to the back of the bar, where there was one bathroom and a phone. I peed a river and afterwards fished in my pocket for a quarter and placed a call. Then I left a sweet tip for J.J. and staggered out of that palace of denial and into the soggy, moonless night.

47

I WAITED PURPOSELY in the shadows of Veronica’s building for another old lady with shopping bags to come along, but it was too late for that. The little courtyard was strangely silent, the plastic-encased elevator was still. The drinks started turning in my stomach and a flowering nausea rose in my throat. While I stood there, concentrating on that blossoming bud, it started raining. I panicked for a moment, not knowing what to do, and then sick and wet I rushed into the vestibule and rang doorbells up and down the metal grid, rang all but hers. One by one they shouted at me through the intercom. “Pizza,” I shouted back in a series of badly accented responses and finally someone, hungry and with pepperoni on the mind, let me in. I walked up the stairs to her floor and then carefully down the thin carpet of her hallway. Her door was locked this time. I rapped it hard with my knuckles. There was no answer but I could see a light through her peephole. I knew she was there, so I rapped on, rapping hard enough and long enough to make my knuckles bleed. Through the alcohol I didn’t feel pain so much as a numbed sensation that I knew would evolve into pain. I kept rapping until she shouted at me, “Go away.”

“Oh, let me in, Veronica.”

“I can’t.”

“Jimmy told you not to let me in, right?”

“He’s furious.”

“I have to see you. Let me in or I’ll throw up right here in the hallway.”

“Do it and go.”

“Let me in,” I said. “Let me explain, at least.”

“Go away.”

I leaned my head against the cool of her door and shouted, “Just tell me one thing, one little thing. Tell me one thing and I’ll leave.”

She didn’t answer, but she didn’t tell me to go away again either.

“Just tell me if Bissonette was better in the sack than me.”

There was nothing for a long moment. Then the metallic click of her unlocking the door. By the time I pushed it open she was already walking away from me. She was dressed seriously, in jeans and a white shirt, heavy shoes. It was a different look for her, a good look, I thought as I lurched into the apartment, ever entranced by her shifting appearances. She sat on the couch, demurely, legs drawn beneath her, head turned to look out the back window onto the rear parking lot. The cast to her face was tense, locked. I got a hard-on looking at her.

On my way toward her I tripped over a suitcase standing upright not far from the door. With the little dignity I could muster I pulled myself up from the floor. She was making it a point not to look at me. I grabbed the handle of the offending suitcase and lifted. It was packed, but packed light, a bag packed for a weekend at the shore.

“Where the hell are you going?” I asked.

“Any suggestions?” she said.

“I hear Cleveland is beautiful this time of year.”

She wanted to smile but held back. I walked over to the couch and stood beside her, swaying a bit, my raincoat shedding tears, and then I dropped down hard onto my haunches and leaned back, trying to look natural sprawled on her floor. The room was spinning on me, but she wasn’t, she was tightly in focus and breathtaking.

“So what about Bissonette?” I said.

“How do you know about Zack?” she asked calmly.

“The police found his little black book,” I said. She was in there, under the name Ronnie, nothing else, no last name, no address, no phone number, just Ronnie. And five stars.

“He was so proud of that book, like a little boy showing off his baseball cards.”

“Tell me about him.”

“Was he better than you? Be a little different, Victor. That’s your problem. You’re so ordinary. You want the same things as every other guy and you have the same little worries. Am I big enough, is my girl pretty enough, do I make enough money. There’s not one unique twitch in your entire body.”

“They feel unique enough to me,” I said. I would have been angry as hell at her except that nausea tends to drive out all conflicting states and so instead of spitting back something devastating and witty I closed my eyes and lay down on her floor. This was a bad drunk. I was going to be sick. I wanted to get this over with before I got sick. I didn’t want to get sick in front of her, I didn’t want to be that vulnerable in front of her, kneeling over the toilet, retching uncontrollably while she leaned on the doorjamb, amused.

“So you met Bissonette at the club,” I said, my eyes still closed. “He was attractive enough and you thought you’d give him a ride.”

“I was bored,” she said. “Zack looked different, that ponytail, the sharp clothes. And he had been a major leaguer. I thought there might be something there but he had turned boring too, like the rest. It happens to anyone who spends too much time in Philadelphia.”

I opened one eye and it was like I was on a Tilt-A-Whirl, so I closed it again. “You dropped him?”

“We played around for a little, then I told him it was over. He didn’t like that.”

“I know how he felt. A man in love.”

“Yeah, he fell, but not until I told him to pound dirt. Before then he thought he was doing me a favor. That’s how to stir passion in a man, I’ve learned. Walk out on him. But he wouldn’t accept it. He acted like it was all a matter of his will and if he wanted me bad enough I could be had.”

“And I guess he wanted you bad enough.”

“He called incessantly. He sent me letters, flowers, Hallmark cards, like that would do it. A bottle of champagne brought by a bozo in a gorilla suit. He was a real charmer, all right. But one night, Jimmy was out of town with his wife. In a fit of absolute boredom, I called him.”

“One last dance.”

“Well, it was easy, you know. Just lift up the phone, like ordering Chinese food. You’re sweating, Victor.”

“It’s hot in here.”

“No, it isn’t. You look like a sweating ghost. Were you drinking those sweet drinks of yours?”

“And those vodka things of yours.”

“Together? Oh, you’re going to be sick all right.”

“Not yet,” I said, though I knew it wouldn’t be long. “And that last night together was when he pulled out the cocaine?”

“Victor, you little detective.”

“Am I right?”

“Yes, Victor, you are right. You have that link ordinary men have with other ordinary men. You can see through their tactics. That’s when he brought me my little gift.”

“And he tricked you into getting high.”

“God, no. He held it out and I nearly raped him to get my hands on it. A sweet vial with one perfect chunk.”

“What about your twelve-step program?”

“Twelve steps to mediocrity. It was too boring without it, too sad. I didn’t realize what was missing until he held out that vial at arm’s length. Then I remembered.”

“But it worked for Bissonette. You stayed with him.”

“You don’t understand. Neither did he. I wasn’t with him anymore, I was with the drug. He was just the prick who brought it.”

“How did Jimmy find out?”

“It wasn’t long before what Zack was bringing over wasn’t enough. So I started back to buying from Norvel.”

“And Jimmy found out.”

“Yes. Henry is still somehow connected with Norvel, I don’t understand in what way, but that’s how Henry found out and he told Jimmy.”

“And Jimmy went crazy.”

“He has a thing about drugs,” she said calmly. But it was more than just drugs, I knew. It was history repeating itself. If it was happening to anyone else Jimmy Moore might have handled it, but not to his surrogate daughter Veronica. He had saved her life, had cleaned her up, and now to see it happen all over again, like it had happened to Nadine, to be threatened with once again losing his daughter was too much to bear, even if it wasn’t his daughter, even if it was only the piece of trim who had taken the place of his daughter. What anger he felt was coming from a deep, primal place within him and there was no soothing it with words, no arresting it with reason, no assuaging it with anything other than blood.

“And then he killed Bissonette,” I said.

“I didn’t know what he was going to do. He came over in a rage and I told him.”

“Who drove him here?”

“I don’t know. He came in alone and I told him. But I didn’t know what he was going to do.”

“You knew.”

“I knew he was going to do something.”

“You knew. Shit.” I struggled to rise to a sitting position and felt my stomach fall like it was falling down a shaft. “What about the series of cash deposits made into your account?” I asked, trying to fight the nausea.

“Jimmy told me what to do. I only did what Jimmy told me.”

“Where did the money end up?”

“I don’t know.”

“You’re lying.”

“I don’t know.”

My falling stomach hit bottom with a spasm. “Oh my God,” I gasped. “I have to go.” I stumbled to my feet and reached out to steady myself and missed the couch armrest and slammed my head into the side table and fell to my knees. It was already up, in my mouth, held there by clenched teeth and my right hand when I struggled again to my feet and ran, bent over, like a hunchback, to the stairs and up two half-flights to her bathroom.

It came out in a noisy, involuntary series of retches that left my sides cramping and my throat burning and saliva hanging from my mouth in long strands. With each retch it felt like it was coming from deeper inside me, until it hurt as much as if pieces of my lungs and guts were coming up along with the alcohol. The toilet was violet from the drinks, violent in color and smell, and my head hung just above the putridity as I waited for the next round. I was still wearing my raincoat, my suit was damp with a feverish sweat. In a brief moment of peace I turned my head and saw her there, leaning against the doorjamb just as I had imagined, except for her face, which was not smug but sad and concerned. I involuntarily lunged back for the bowl as the retches began again. The next time I turned around she was gone.

When it was finished I stood up and felt instantly relieved, light, spry. I was no longer sweating, the room was no longer spinning, but there was enough alcohol in me to still feel the recklessness of a mild buzz. I cleaned my face with cold water and soap and then opened her medicine cabinet. It was full of cosmetics arranged haphazardly, little red plastic medicine containers, Band-Aids, too many Band-Aids. I pulled out a thick plastic comb and ran it through my hair, I used her toothbrush to scrub my teeth, I rinsed my mouth with her Scope. When I came downstairs she was putting on an overcoat.

“Where are you going?” I asked.

“Away. It’s ruined for me here.”

“Because of what I did in court today?”

“No, but that was the signal to leave.”

“Why don’t you stay, get some help?”

“I don’t need help,” she said.

“You’re a drug addict, Veronica. You need help. You need to check in someplace.”

“I’m going home.”

“Iowa?” I asked.

“Maybe.”

“You need more than a veterinarian.”

“Good-bye, Victor.”

“He’s going to let Chester take the rap for what he did.”

“I know,” she said. “That’s too bad. Chet was always sweet to me. We slept together once, did I tell you? The night he said he had a crush on me I let him.”

I tried not to think about it, to imagine it. “You could save him,” I pressed on. “You could testify, tell them what happened.”

“No, I can’t, Victor. You know I can’t do anything against Jimmy.”

“He didn’t save you, Veronica. Look at yourself.”

“But what he did he did for me, don’t you see? Of all of you, of Zack and you and Norvel and Chet, of all of you only Jimmy loved me. I won’t betray that.”

“I love you.”

“You love it,” she said sharply.

“More than that.”

“Really, Victor? Consider it carefully. From the first I’ve lied to you. We’ve never spent a full night together, never shared breakfast, the first coffee of the morning, the first cigarette. You know nothing about me, Victor, so what about me could you possibly love other than our sex?”

“It’s not so easily calculable, it’s not like a ledger.”

“Oh, yes it is,” she said. “Just like you told me the first night we met.”

“You can’t know what I feel.”

“I don’t think you know either.”

There was a pause and I started thinking about what she was saying and then I stopped, because I didn’t want to think about it, I didn’t want to look into it.

“You’re the only one who can stop Chester from losing his freedom,” I said. “Stop him from losing his life for something he didn’t do. You have the duty to save him.”

“No, Victor. You’re his lawyer. You save him.” She looked up at me with moist eyes and a tear rolled down her cheek. “Please.”

I couldn’t tell if she was asking me to save Chester or asking me to save her, but it didn’t really matter. I leaned over and brushed one of her tears away with my lips and then kissed her and her lips opened and my lips opened and I felt her tongue once again and the electricity and the wanting and the unquenchable thirst. I reached a hand to her hair and grabbed and kissed her again and she kissed me back and I wished desperately that it could have been different. She sighed into my mouth. I rubbed my hand in her hair and kissed her again.

“You brushed your teeth, at least,” she said.

I smiled at her and we kissed once more and my hand dropped from her hair to her back to the little hollow at the bottom of her spine and I pressed her to me there and her arms slung themselves around my neck and we squeezed ourselves together and the alcohol in my blood burned itself off with that kiss. And as she pulled me closer toward her, melting herself to the contours of my body, I knew what I had to do. With my free hand I reached into my raincoat and grappled around and pulled out the envelope.

“This is for you,” I said.

She gave me a curious look and then ripped open the envelope with the excitement of a little girl opening a valentine. But it wasn’t a valentine.

Inside was a piece of paper with great Gothic letters across the top spelling out “The United States District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania” and ordering the said Veronica Ashland of 225 Church Street in the City of Philadelphia, the County of Philadelphia, the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, to appear in the United States District Court on the date specified, at 10:00 A.M., as a witness for defendant Chester Concannon in the trial of United States v. Moore and Concannon. The document was signed by the clerk of the court and accompanied by a check for thirty-six dollars, which included the witness fee and travel reimbursement for the four-block walk from her apartment to the courthouse.

“You bastard,” she said when she realized what it was. “You subpoenaed me.”

“Yes, I did.”

“How could you? How dare you?”

“You told me that I should save Chet’s butt. That’s exactly what I’m going to do.”

“I won’t go. I’m not going.”

“If you don’t go, sweetheart, you’re going to end up in jail.”

“Fuck you.”

I leaned over again to kiss her on the cheek, but she backed away from me as if I were about to rip her flesh with my teeth. So instead I gave her a light chuck on the arm and left her apartment for good.

From the huge window in her elevator, as it dropped slowly, I could see the empty plaza and the cobbled street beyond. It was still raining, pouring. Across the city old men, dazed by too much alcohol and life, were snoring. I turned up the collar of my raincoat and dashed out into the plaza. When I reached the street I looked first right, then left. I saw the car, an old gray Honda Accord, a short way down the street, parked in front of a little coffee store. I ran to it. The door opened and I ducked inside.

“An umbrella, Victor,” said Sheldon Kapustin. “It’s a relatively new invention, but very handy on nights like tonight.”

“Where’s Morris?”

“My father hasn’t spent all night on a stakeout since the Rosenbluth jewelry heist of ’seventy-eight. Did he ever tell you about that one?”

“No.”

“He will. It’s his favorite story.”

“She’s in there. Pretty, shoulder-length brown hair, about five six, thin. She’s wearing a navy blue overcoat. She’ll be carrying a black suitcase. She didn’t pack much, and practically no cosmetics, so I don’t expect she’ll be going far.”

“Is there a back entrance?”

“Only an emergency exit with an alarm. No, if she comes out she’ll come out here. I just want to know where she is. If she’s about to get on a train or a plane stop her and then let me know immediately. I’ll get a U.S. marshal on her.”

“Sure thing.”

“What about Corpus Christi?”

“Just so happens, Victor, the number I spotted is a pay phone next to a marina. We sent a picture down to someone we trust to check it out.”

“Let me know.”

He nodded. “You want a ride home?”

“I’ll find a cab,” I said. “You just keep your eye on her.”

“If she’s as pretty as you say, Victor, that won’t be a problem.”

The rain was falling into my collar and down my back as I walked along Market Street looking for a cab. By the time I found one I was so wet it didn’t matter. I sat in the rear, rainwater puddling on the vinyl seat, and leaned my head back. I wanted to sleep is what I wanted to do. I was tired, too tired to even lift my head. I thought about stripping off my soaking clothes and standing in a hot shower and collapsing onto my pillow and sleeping. But I didn’t have the time. What I had to do was strip off my clothes and take a cold shower and spend the night with my trial notes and my law books and prepare myself to devastate the inevitably self-serving and perjured testimony of James Douglas Moore.

48

I WAS WORKING AT MY red Formica dining table, preparing for Moore’s examination, when my doorbell rang. The table was covered with documents and yellow pads and books, Mauet’s Fundamentals of Trial Technique, Wellman’s The Art of Cross-Examination, Appleman’s Successful Jury Trials, my copy of the Federal Criminal Code and Rules, but even with all that help I was getting nowhere. And then my doorbell rang. It was after 10:00 P.M. and no one should have been ringing my bell after 10:00 P.M. I remembered that the last time my bell had been rung late at night I had found Veronica on my doorstep. That would be serious trouble, I thought, but I couldn’t help but also remember the feel of that last kiss and know that I still wanted more.

In a T-shirt and jeans I slipped cautiously down the steps and peered into the vestibule. Outside, it was still raining. I could see a woman in a raincoat standing in the vestibule, staring back out to the street. My throat closed down on me for a moment and then she turned around.

“Beth,” I said as I ripped open the door. “God, come in, Beth.”

She stepped into the hallway, her hair flat against her head, her raincoat dripping. She looked closely at my face as if in doubt as to what she would find there. “I heard about what happened in court today,” she said. “How you went after that witness.”

I nodded. “The good reverend. Well, my client seems to have discovered that he was being betrayed.”

“How did he discover that?”

“Somehow, and I’m not saying how, but somehow I got hold of a document from Prescott’s office that spelled it out.”

“And you gave it to him?”

“He’s my client.”

She smiled cautiously. “So I assume then, Victor, your future will not be taken care of by William Prescott III. What about those horrible Bishop brothers?”

“I’ve been fired,” I said. “And the Saltz settlement’s been pulled.”

Her smile widened. “My oh my. How are we ever going to make ends meet now?”

“We?”

“The news said that Moore would be on the stand tomorrow. I thought you might want help preparing your cross.”

“What about Community Legal Services?” I asked. “What about aiding the poor and disadvantaged?”

She shook her head at me and then reached around my waist, giving a crushing hug. The wet of her raincoat soaked cold through my T-shirt. “That’s what I’m doing, Victor,” she said. “And frankly, sweetheart, you can use all the aid you can get.”

She disentangled herself from me and headed up the stairs. I looked after her for a moment. So it wasn’t all bad, I thought as I watched her climb to my apartment. Even if everything else turned out wrong, it wasn’t all bad.

We worked. Beth’s mind was more analytical than mine and she helped me organize my disparate thoughts and far-flung tactics. Together we began to map out a strategy for going after the councilman, a thrust here, a trap there, questions emphasizing two facts that when brought together were blatantly inconsistent. We outlined generally the approaches I would take and then practiced on each other, framing our questions with great care to avoid the inevitable evasiveness of his answers. And where before Beth arrived I had been at a total loss, as we worked together the examination began to form itself into something more than a series of unconnected questions, to form itself into a coherent and effective assault on his credibility.

I was stretching from weariness, shaking my head at how much more we had to do, when the phone rang.

“So how do you think the old lady looked?” said Chuckie Lamb from the other end of the connection. His voice was subdued, not a bark anymore, but the sound of it still sent a shiver through me.

“I didn’t mean to bother her,” I said.

“How do you think she looked?” he said again, more insistent.

“Pretty good, Chuckie.”

“Yeah, but you should have seen her when. She was a beauty when. A real beauty.”

“I’m sorry if…”

“She was the queen of the neighborhood,” he said, cutting me off before I could finish apologizing for my visit. “And classy too. The windows in our house, they came from up and down the street to see her curtains, from blocks around. She was artistic, she loved the opera. That’s what we listened to, after my father left, all the time. It was great after my father left because he was a fuck and after he left then it was just Mommy and me. She was a beauty, I’m telling you.”

“I believe it,” I lied. I couldn’t imagine that toad-faced woman with her working gums as a bathing beauty. Beth was staring up at me, wondering what was going on. I shrugged like I had no idea, which I didn’t.

“Once in the fourth grade,” said Chuckie, “there was some kid beating the hell out of me. A Jewish kid, Levi, the school bully. Just whaling on me.”

Good for Levi, I thought.

“When Mommy finds out she comes to the playground after school and lifts this Levi by his collar, this big kid hanging in the air, and she tells him he touches me again she’d bite his nose off. He pissed himself, he was that scared. Levi never bothered me again. On her way out of the park she slugs me with the back of her hand, knocks me down, gives me a beautiful shiner. I never got razzed as a momma’s boy because of the way she hit me. How could they after that, and she knew it, too. That was her way, always taking care of me. She’s getting better every day, I can tell. She’ll be home soon. Making me her shepherd’s pie, putting Wagner or Berlioz on the record player. How do you think she looks?”

“She looks great,” I said.

“She does, doesn’t she. That was right of you to visit. Eight years with the councilman and never once did he visit.”

“What’s going on, Chuckie?” I asked.

“Not one fucking visit. He never cared, treated me like cat piss the whole time. Chet visited, but he’s like that. Brought flowers. She likes flowers.”

“What’s going on?”

“You surprised me today,” he said. “I thought you’d keep bending over for them, I was certain of it, though when I found out you visited Mommy I began to wonder. Why would he do something like that? Except maybe if he’s not going to stay bent over. But it was still a surprise. I saw you talking with Prescott.”

“A friendly chat,” I said.

“And you subpoenaed the girl.”

“Yes, I did.”

“What you did in court was bad enough,” he said. “They are very upset at you, furious. But you shouldn’t have subpoenaed the girl. It was a mistake. They have their plans. You are in far greater danger than you realize.”

“Is this another threat? Is that what this is all about?”

“You’re misunderstanding again, like you did before. All I wanted was to help Chet. I knew from the first that Jimmy would turn on him. I was certain you knew too and were going along with it. But then you surprised me. Listen, you can’t realize the depths of the councilman’s betrayal. It goes way beyond Chet, which is bad enough. It goes beyond anything imaginable.”

Suddenly it dawned on me that Chuckie Lamb was trying to help. “What happened to the missing money?” I asked.

“I have a story for you.”

“Like Jack and the beanstalk?”

“More like Faust,” he said. “But not over the phone.”

“Okay. Let’s meet. Anywhere.”

“I’m close to the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, do you know it?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Ten minutes.”

“Sure,” I said and then I thought for a moment and let a wave of paranoia float over me. “I can trust you, can’t I, Chuckie? This isn’t a setup, is it?”

“You’ll understand when we talk,” he said. “It will all be enough to make you sick. Ten minutes.”

When I hung up Beth was still staring at me. “I have to go,” I told her.

“Was that Chuckie Lamb?”

“I think so,” I said. “But he was mellower than usual, like Chuckie Lamb on Quaaludes.”

“What does he want?”

“He wants to tell me a story,” I said. “I have to go. Don’t wait up for me.”

I found my sneakers, put on a white shirt over my T-shirt, grabbed my raincoat out of the closet. I had already opened the door when I turned around and asked her, “Do you know where the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier is?”

“Arlington?” she said.

“No, here.”

“Is there one?”

“Dammit,” I said, realizing I had told Chuckie I’d be there without knowing where it was. “Who can I ask?” I said. “Is the tourist bureau open?”

“It’s after midnight,” she said. “How about the phone book?”

“What, under tombs?”

“The yellow pages have maps in the front,” she said and she was right.

I searched through a map of Center City historical sights and there it was, in Washington Square, off Locust between 6th and 7th, the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier of the American Revolution, a soldier so unknown I hadn’t even known he had a tomb. As soon as I found it on the map I headed for the door, late already, hoping Chuckie wouldn’t leave before I got there.

Through the heavy rain I ran to my car. I soaked the seat when I sat down. I drove east on Locust, past DiLullo’s and the Academy of Music, over Broad Street, straight through the rain until the road detoured at 7th Street, routing around Washington Square. I spun around the park and snapped to a stop at an illegal spot on 7th and rushed out.

The park was larger than a city block in size, ringed with a low brick wall. I ran through a gate and toward the center. The square was black with shadow, trees hanging low, blocking out whatever light the sky was dropping down. A few of the colonial-style street lamps let out a thin, lethargic light, the majority were dark. At the fountain in the center, its spout dead on this wet night, I spun around. From there I could see, on the west side of the park, twin rows of flagpoles, like a guard of honor, leading to a large wall of stone fronted by a statue.

I walked through a well of darkness between the flagpoles and came upon the tomb, lighted by two thin beams of white halogen. On a raised stone platform, behind a chain held aloft by bronze balusters, was a sarcophagus and behind that, atop a granite pedestal, a bronze of Washington leaning on his sword. I looked around. Nothing. I read the inscription on the wall of stone behind Washington: FREEDOM IS A LIGHT FOR WHICH MANY MEN HAVE DIED IN DARKNESS. I looked around again. Nothing. I had missed him. “Dammit,” I said out loud as the rain spilled from my bare head down the collar of my coat, drenching my shirt. “Dammit to hell,” I said.

Then I heard something from behind that great wall of stone.

“Chuckie?” I said.

No answer.

But then came the shadow. From behind the wall of stone. It staggered through the low bushes, stumbling around the wall, toward me. I stepped back. It still came at me, stumbling again, reeling, barely maintaining its balance. And then it lurched into that thin halogen beam and the weak white light fell on its face.

It was Chuckie.

He came closer, it looked like he was wearing a beard, a disguise, and then he stumbled again and fell into my arms and slid through them and fell upon the raised chain, his shoulders slipping down until his head rested beside the foot of the sarcophagus.

I bent over him. My God, it wasn’t a beard.

He was making a sound, a soft gurgle of a sound, blood pouring onto the stone platform from his mouth, from his slit throat, blood mixing with the rain, pooling into a puddle, growing lighter, weaker, until it was washed clean. Another gurgle, soft, horrifying, and then no more gurgles. Just Chuckie Lamb and the blood falling from his throat being washed to clear by the rain and no sound but the drops falling onto the park, onto the great stone wall, onto Washington’s sword, onto the sarcophagus, onto his lifeless body, onto an envelope peeking out from his jacket, onto his neck, onto his face, no sound but the cleansing voice of the rain.

I took the envelope and ran like hell.

49

IT WAS BIG NEWS the next morning. The police had been summoned by a mysterious 911 call and had found him lying in the rain, his throat slashed. The official statement was that Charles Lamb, 43, unmarried, of Northeast Philadelphia, press secretary to City Councilman Jimmy Moore, had been found murdered at Washington Square. No motive for the killing was yet known and there were no suspects. He was survived by only his mother, Connie Lamb, residing at the St. Vincent’s Home for the Aged. The funeral was scheduled for Thursday afternoon at the Galzerano Funeral Home on Torresdale Avenue. That was the official statement, but there were rumors of late-night liaisons in public places with young boys and an editorial in the Daily News suggested that the police kiosk in the park be manned all night to ensure that Washington Square not turn into still another location for shadowy rendezvous as had turned so many of the public parks in the city.

Chester was mute with suffering, his pain marked only in a redness about his eyes, a tightness in his lips. I told him I was sorry and he shrugged me away, but I could see the hurt. I hadn’t known before that they had been so close. Jimmy chose to vocalize his feelings, telling the press how valued a member of his team Chuckie had been. “This crime,” he said on the steps of the courthouse, the start of his speech timed with precision so as to be captured live by the television cameras, “will only increase my determination to continue my crusade. I have experienced many tragedies in my life, and this is still one more. But whoever thinks they can deter me from my cause, whoever thinks they can halt my progress, whoever thinks they can threaten or bully or kill my good work is deeply mistaken. We go on, we keep fighting, the dealers of death will be beaten and we will be victorious, and those like Chuckie Lamb, who were martyred in the struggle, will for always be remembered as heroes.”

Jimmy Moore, I figured, had wasted no time in grabbing himself another speechwriter.

Chuckie Lamb had neither been indicted nor intended to be called as a witness for either side, so his murder had no real impact on the trial. Judge Gimbel suggested, in light of the death of someone so close to the councilman, that we adjourn until tomorrow and Eggert readily agreed, but Jimmy Moore stood up in the courtroom and stated that he was ready to testify that very day.

“You want to testify today?” asked the judge.

“Yes, sir,” said Jimmy Moore. “Mr. Lamb would have wanted the trial to continue so that I can get this shoddy affair over with as soon as possible and direct my full attention once again to the business of the people.”

“That’s fine, Councilman Moore,” said the judge.

And so the jury was brought in and Prescott stood. “The defense,” he said, “calls Councilman James Douglas Moore to the stand.”

Jimmy Moore had not spent a career riling up constituents and making impromptu political speeches without learning a thing or two about how to work a crowd, whether it be a thousand supporters on an election-eve rally or twelve jurors and two alternates with his future under their thumbs. I knew what his story would be, that he was the unwitting victim of the fiendish Chester Concannon’s extortion plans, and such was the story he told, but the way he told it was something else again. He wasn’t the chagrined and sorry defendant, he wasn’t the humble man pleading his innocence, he wasn’t quiet and reserved, confident to leave his fate in the hands of a jury of his peers. What he was instead was an angry man who had been betrayed by his aide, victimized by his government, subjected to political vendetta, and forced to defend what needed no defending. I would have thought before his testimony that such a demeanor would inspire enemies and turn off the sympathy of the jurors, but I would have been wrong. It was clearly playing in the Peoria that was the jury box.

Under Prescott’s gentle questioning Moore spelled out his defense in clear and angry sentences. No, he did not illegally extort money from Michael Ruffing. Yes, he had helped with Ruffing’s development plan in City Council because it was a good plan, and yes, he expected campaign contributions for such help, but that was the way the world worked in politics. “It’s the American system,” said Jimmy Moore, “and God bless the American system. God bless America.” No, he had not known of the $250,000 given to Concannon in cash and had he known he would have forbidden it. No, he had not talked about money with Ruffing, that was not his style, he would have accepted whatever support Ruffing chose to give and he had thought the five fifty-thousand-dollar checks actually received by CUP to be extremely generous. Yes, he was angry when Ruffing told him he would stop payments, it smacked of betrayal. “We were fighting for something side by side,” he testified. “Ruffing knew I was counting on him to help with the agenda of healing. And then he had simply walked away.” But no, of course he had not killed Zack Bissonette. He had already raised over two million dollars for a run at higher office, why would he risk everything over a few thousand here or there? No, he had not burned down Bissonette’s, it had been one of his favorite clubs. Yes, he lived an extravagant lifestyle, and why not? His wife had money, he had money from outside investments, why not live high if he could afford it? “If the prosecutor wants to indict me for drinking champagne and having a limousine, then fine, indict me for that and let’s try it on those grounds. But not on the fabricated charges they are leveling against me here. Not on the basis of nothing but political vendetta.”

He told them about Veronica in a quiet voice, dripping with abashment. Yes, he’d had a mistress. Her name was Veronica Ashland. She had been a college student hooked on crack. He had pulled her out of a crack house he had been closing down in West Philadelphia and had personally brought her to a drug rehabilitation center. After saving her life he felt some responsibility to her and visited her in the treatment center. She was getting healthier, learning to live without drugs, and between them a friendship blossomed that turned into something more. He was sorry for the pain it had caused his wife, his family, it had happened and he was sorry and now it was over. “But I am truly bitter,” he said, “toward my deceitful aide who has sought to use my painful relationship with this poor girl against me.”

He saved his bitterest vitriol, of course, for Chet Concannon. A lying, ungrateful cur, he called him. Chet was a nothing when Jimmy found him, a steak slinger who dreamed of getting involved in politics. He had given Chet a job as an intern and promoted him through the ranks until he had become his chief aide. He had trusted Chet Concannon, he had loved Chet Concannon, and in the end, Chet Concannon had betrayed him. Chet was a thief, a liar, he had peddled Moore’s good name for a quarter of a million dollars. For all Jimmy knew Chet was a murderer, an arsonist, he didn’t know exactly what Chet had done to keep his scam going, but he had learned the painful lesson that Chet Concannon was capable of almost any heinousness to achieve his self-interested ends. “Just the other day, in this very courthouse,” said Jimmy, “Concannon attacked me physically. He is seeking my ruin. He is my Brutus, plotting my fall. He is my Judas.”

When his direct examination was finished, there was an emotional silence in the courtroom. Prescott stood at the podium, eyes down, letting the silence hang there and intensify. I looked at the jury and they were split. Half were looking at Jimmy with sympathy and affection and admiration. The other half were staring at Chet Concannon with a violent contempt. When the silence hung just long enough for maximum effect, Prescott smiled at Jimmy as one smiles to a friend and said, “We have no further questions.”

“Mr. Carl,” said the judge, “do you wish to cross?” He peered down at me over his half-glasses and waited for my response.

I had not yet recovered from the sight of Chuckie Lamb dying in my arms, I had not yet been able to erase the amazement of it, the sense of awe, the overwhelming rush of fear. This man who had been alive just a few moments ago was now dead, his life had flowed out the gash in his throat, past my shoes, into the sodden ground beneath the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier of the American Revolution. The sight of it was something I would haul along with me the rest of my days. I came home from the park after driving around for hours to find Beth asleep on the couch. What I did was strip off my clothes and dump them in the washer, raincoat and sneakers included, and I washed them with three cups of detergent while I stayed under the shower until the water turned cold. And then I slept, or tried to, shaking myself awake whenever I dreamed of Chuckie with the beard that wasn’t a beard. I hadn’t yet had the time I needed to deal with my first encounter with a dead man.

But this I knew. Chuckie Lamb wasn’t killed by some young hustler out to rob his trick, like the papers made it seem, and Chuckie Lamb wasn’t killed by a drug dealer out to scare off the councilman, like Jimmy Moore made it seem. No sir. He was killed because he was going to tell me all he knew about the councilman and the missing money. He was killed by Jimmy Moore, who had killed Bissonette before him and who would kill others if need be, Jimmy Moore, who had lied to Chester, to me, who had lied under oath on the stand, Jimmy Moore, with his cheap sanctimony and elephantine prick, Jimmy Moore. He had done it, dammit, and I would make him pay, I would, I would hurt him, I would. If I achieved nothing else in this life what I would achieve was to hurt Jimmy Moore.

He sat there on the stand, his chest thrown out, his eyes hard with determination, he sat there waiting for me. Well, he would get me, all right.

“Mr. Carl,” said Judge Gimbel. “Do you or do you not want to cross-examine this witness?”

“Oh, I want to, Your Honor,” I said, rising and walking with great purpose to the podium. I stared at Jimmy Moore and he stared back and for a moment we were locked together in some violent rush of antagonism. And then I saw it, what I had been looking for, what I had been hoping to see: fear. He knew what he was facing, did Jimmy Moore. The bastard knew what I knew, knew what I felt, and he was right to be afraid.

I tapped the podium softly with my fist once, twice. And then I began.

50

AFTER IT WAS OVER, after all the shouting, after all the sustained objections, after all the lies and the questions repeated with emphasis and the repeated lies, after all the pounding on the podium and the admonitions of the court and the requests for citations of contempt by Prescott and Eggert both, after all the sidebar conferences, after all the portentous questions asked and withdrawn before an answer could be given, after all the shouting, I was back in my apartment, hugging my chest as I lay curled on my couch, my shoes still on, my head in Beth’s lap as she caressed my scalp and promised me it wasn’t, it wasn’t, it wasn’t as bad as all that.

“Oh, yes it was,” I said, and yes it had been.

I had charged at Jimmy Moore’s story like a bull, my horns aimed straight at its heart, but when I picked up my head I realized I had charged past him and he was still sitting in that witness chair, calm, smooth, waiting to deflect my next pass with his cape of lies. He was the matador, controlling me with his pace, with his responses, and he made a fool of me more than once in the course of the interrogation.

“You did all you could do,” said Beth.

“He ate me for lunch, and spit out the bones.”

“Now you’re feeling sorry for yourself,” she said.

“The bastard was lying, Beth. All I wanted to do was to show him up to be a liar.”

“That’s not so easy a thing to do with a practiced liar. You didn’t get everything you wanted out of him, but you got all that you needed.”

“You think?” I asked.

“Yes.”

“Well, maybe,” I said, and maybe I had because I never for a moment thought I could win the case on Jimmy Moore’s testimony alone. My idea was that the truth would save Chester Concannon, a quaint idea in this age where obfuscation and spin are the key to success in all realms, but there it was, and I could never have expected anything approaching the truth to come from Jimmy Moore’s lips. No, the most I could have expected from Jimmy Moore was to create a pedestal on which the truth could later stand and that was maybe what I had done.

I had asked him about his daughter and he told again how she had died. I had asked about the rush of emotions that overcame him upon her death and, practiced as he was in exposing his inner feelings when they could do him the most good, he spoke of the pain, the agony, the anger. And out of it all, I had asked, had grown a hatred for those who sold drugs to children, hadn’t it, Councilman?

“They are murderers, killers of children.”

“And you hate them all, with all the power of your powerful passion.”

“That’s right, Mr. Carl.”

“You have rededicated your life to fighting the scourge.”

“That is correct. They are murderers and they must be destroyed, each and every one.”

“No matter the means, no matter the cost?”

“They must be beaten.”

“Because they killed your daughter?”

“Yes, and thousands of others like her.”

“And you will see them all dead?”

“It is my mission.”

“Single-handedly?”

“If I must.”

“Vengeance shall be mine, sayeth the councilman, is that it?” I had asked, expecting not an answer but an objection, which was exactly what I got, sustained by the judge.

“That was a nice touch, I thought,” said Beth as she stroked my head. Whenever my mind drifted back to those moments in court I could feel my adrenals kick into action and I began to shiver. It was her soothing touch that would calm me once again, would bring me back to the ease of the evening encampment when the battle was over for the day. “Quoting the Bible was very Darrowish,” she said.

“Nothing gets them angrier than a Jew shoving the New Testament in their faces,” I said.

“It wasn’t the only time you got him angry.”

“I thought he was pretty calm throughout,” I said.

“No, Victor. He especially didn’t like when you started talking about his mistress.”

“Who would?” I said.

There was not much I could do but press his buttons and see which ones blew him up. The eruptions hadn’t come as colorfully as I had hoped, but they had come and the jury had seen the anger seething within him. Like when I had asked about his high living, his club-hopping, his taste for the finest, most expensive champagnes.

“Life is to be lived, Mr. Carl.”

“And you have a personal limousine and a driver?”

“For protection primarily.”

“And you support a mistress?”

“She supported herself, but there were certain expenses involved, yes. But that was the least of the costs to me of that tragic affair. The least.”

“And all that required money?”

“Yes. But I work.”

“A city councilman doesn’t earn enough to slosh champagne in his limousine, does he?”

“I’m glad you brought that up, Mr. Carl. No, we don’t. And I donate much of my salary to charity in any event. But I was in business before politics and sold my company for a substantial amount. And in the last few years our personal investments have flourished.”

“Who controls the money in your family?”

“My wife, Leslie.”

“And so to finance your evenings with your mistress you asked your wife for money.”

“We have joint accounts.”

“And she never asked about your expenditures?”

“She trusts me, Mr. Carl.”

“As you would have the jury trust you, is that right?”

The laughter from the jury box was answer enough and the councilman had turned bright red. “That’s something I found,” I told Beth when we were on that couch, reviewing the day, trying to find whatever victories we could dig out of the mess that was my cross-examination. “Defendants don’t like it when the jury laughs at them.”

“He didn’t like it when you asked him about the anonymous cash donations to his youth centers, either,” said Beth.

“I didn’t expect him to,” I said. “But for all the bluster, it didn’t do much good.”

Those questions came from the envelope I took off the dead Chuckie Lamb. I had hoped for revelations, a litany of answers, a solution to the puzzles that had been bedeviling me, but what I got instead were numbers. A monthly breakdown of donations to the Nadine Moore Youth Centers, showing receipt of anonymous cash donations that had been increasing steadily. But even the steady increase couldn’t account for the jump that had happened about five months or so back, an extra fifty thousand a month of cash donations flowing into his projects. Fifty thousand a month with no indication where it was coming from. So I asked him.

“From concerned citizenry,” said the councilman.

I asked him about the jump in the amount of cash donations and he grew red for a moment and calmed.

“We’ve been reaching out to the community for funds,” he said, “And those efforts have finally borne fruit.”

I asked him why the additional funding was in cash, why given anonymously.

“We don’t ask who gives or why they give, we take the money and work our healing magic and we are making a difference.”

For every question I asked him he had an answer and the judge refused to let the jury examine a piece of paper that came out of nowhere and signified nothing. And so, when there were no more questions to ask, I moved on, failing to have learned what the numbers were meant to show. Without Chuckie’s explanation they were useless and Jimmy Moore had made certain Chuckie wasn’t around to give his explanation.

“You didn’t mention to anyone that I had gone to meet Chuckie last night, did you?” I asked Beth.

“Of course not,” she said.

“No one should know,” I said.

“Why not tell Slocum what happened?”

“Chuckie was dead when I got there,” I lied, “and I ran when I saw him. I’ve watched enough bad movies to know what happens to the guy who finds the corpse.”

“Be serious, Victor. Slocum won’t think you killed him.”

“I’m not gambling my life on what he’ll think,” I said, but it wasn’t just about Slocum I was worried. I had run with a blind terror from the dead Chuckie Lamb because his mortal wound was only seconds old, which meant that whoever had killed him was right there, behind that stone wall, ready for me. I don’t know if he knew who Chuckie was planning to meet, or how much Chuckie had told before the meeting, but if he didn’t know already I didn’t want to tell him who to ask, now or ever.

“After the trial,” I said, “I’ll make sure Slocum gets the donation list. But I don’t want you to be involved.”

She thought on that a while. “Morris was there today,” she said finally, mercifully changing the subject. “For a little while at least, talking with one of the court buffs, an old man with what looked like a hole in his head.”

“Herm Finklebaum,” I said. “He sold toys on Forty-fourth Street.”

“Morris told me to tell you your friend Veronica is at the Society Hill Sheraton,” said Beth.

“She didn’t get too far, did she.” The Society Hill Sheraton was about three blocks from her apartment building.

“Is she going to give you what you need?” asked Beth.

“No,” I said. “She is incapable of giving me that. But she’ll testify, and what she has to say will bury Jimmy.”

And it would, too, I thought, if Jimmy didn’t kill her first. He had killed Bissonette and had caused the killing of Chuckie Lamb, I was sure, but I didn’t believe he could kill Veronica. He had lost one daughter, how could he kill her surrogate, what kind of monster would do that. And suddenly I grew frightened for Veronica Ashland, and rightly so, for if there was any success in that day in court it was my success in showing all of which Jimmy Moore was capable. I had asked him about his temper, asked him if he grew angry when he saw something that shouldn’t be, a wrong to be righted. I asked him if his temper ever got the best of him, whether he ever turned violent, and he denied it. But then I asked if he knew a drug dealer named Norvel Goodwin and he sat a little straighter in the witness box. The judge overruled the objection and I asked it again.

“If you step out into the community, Mr. Carl, you learn of all the snakes in the grass waiting for the children.”

“Now, Mr. Goodwin was operating his drug enterprise out of a house in West Philadelphia, wasn’t he?”

“Yes. That was two or three years ago.”

“And one night you stormed that house with a gang from the neighborhood.”

“A group of citizens alarmed about the drugs in their community.”

“And that was the night you found your mistress, Veronica Ashland?”

“That’s right. She was in that house being murdered with his drugs.”

“And that same night you also beat Mr. Goodwin to near death?”

No answer.

“With a chair, isn’t that right?”

Still no answer.

“Well, yes or no, Councilman?”

“It was self-defense.”

“Was it self-defense when you burned that crack house down?”

“I don’t know how it burned.”

“Was it self-defense that killed the two boys hiding in the attic of that house?”

“I don’t know how it burned.”

“Was it self-defense when you broke the jaw of the schoolboy who was courting your wife thirty years ago?”

The judge never let him answer that one, too much time had passed for it to remain a relevant incident, he said, but the question had done its work, all those questions had done their work, I hoped. So maybe Beth was right, maybe I had done what I needed to do. Because Jimmy Moore wasn’t my star witness and no matter how many times I asked if he had killed Bissonette only to have him deny it I had gotten from him what I really needed. He had shown himself to be a man whose passionate hatred for illegal drugs and their peddlers could cause him to fly into violent rages, a man who had beaten drug dealers with chairs, who had burned out crack houses no matter who was still inside, who had broken the jaw of a rival suitor while still in high school, in short a man who, with the right prodding, in the right situation, for the right reason, was capable of murder. All I had needed from Jimmy Moore was to set up the testimony of Veronica Ashland. It was up to Veronica to do the rest.

“You miss her,” said Beth, her fingers gently stroking my forehead, easing the surge of fear and anger at my own impotence that arose whenever I thought about what was happening at the trial. The smooth brush of her fingertips was drowsing and I didn’t hear what she said at first, so she repeated it. “You miss her.”

“Yes,” I said, and I did. It felt like there was a gap in my life, like something marvelous and strange had just up and disappeared. I wondered if this was what a dog felt after being fixed.

“How bad does it hurt?” she asked.

“Bad,” I said. “I don’t want to talk about it. How about you? Tell me about Alberto.” I rolled the “r” as I said the name.

“Alberto. Sweet Alberto. He is very handsome and very kind and his accent is wonderfully sexy. A prize, really.”

“And that is why you dumped him?”

“You’ve been listening to gossip,” she said. And then, after a pause, “I guess he was too happy, too contented. He accepted the world for what it was and accepted his place in it.”

“Suddenly I’m jealous,” I said. “That might just be the very recipe for happiness.”

“I’ve been with you too long, Victor, with your cynicism, your bitterness, your dissatisfaction. After my years with you, how could I ever bear the cheerful acceptance and bland optimism of the Albertos of the world?”

“Alone again, just the two of us,” I said, and then I joked, “It looks like we’re stuck with each other.”

She just stroked my hair and said nothing for a long while, so long a while that if it had been anyone other than my best friend Beth it would have been awkward. But it wasn’t awkward. She stroked my brow and eased me into a state just above sleep and the two of us remained like that for quite a while.

“It’s never going to happen, is it?” she said finally.

“I don’t think so,” I said.

“Why not, Victor?”

“It’s just not there. No matter how much we wish it were, it just isn’t. It would be too perfect anyway, too easy.”

“I could live with easy,” she said.

“Shhh. I am so tired.”

“I could damn well live with easy.”

“Shhh.” I closed my eyes and felt the softness of her fingers through my hair. “I need to sleep. Just a little nap. Shhh. We’ll talk later, later, I promise, but just let me sleep a little first.”

When I woke on my couch the next morning she was gone.

51

I ARRIVED AT THE COURTHOUSE late to find Judge Gimbel beet-red in anger at me. With the jury waiting in their stuffy little room he gave me a ten-minute lecture on the need for punctuality in the legal system, explaining in wildly mixed metaphors how any delay, like a falling domino, can upset the entire applecart of justice. He was going to hold me in contempt, he said, fine me for each minute I was late, and if it happened again, did I understand, I would land myself in jail, did I understand, as sure as I was standing there, did I understand.

I told him I understood.

And then, after pronouncing my sentence and the terms of my probation, he demanded an explanation for my inexcusable tardiness. Well, he told me, well, Mr. Carl, well, he told me, he was waiting.

“I was shot at this morning by an unknown assailant,” I told the judge.

That shut the gape in his great prune face.

“It was not the first time I had been shot at during the span of this trial, Your Honor. The police detained me for questioning, which is why I was delayed.”

So much for my contempt citation.

It again had happened outside my apartment. Two shots. One had spattered the edge of a concrete windowsill just by my head, sending shards spraying in a violent cloud of tiny, incising projectiles that cut a delicate red blossom into the skin around my left eye. The second shot had powered into my briefcase, reflexively jerked chest high after the first spray of cement. They had found the bullet lodged two-thirds of the way through my copy of the Federal Criminal Code and Rules.

Yes, the law had indeed saved my life.

After the second shot I dropped prone, more out of paralytic shock than any well-trained defensive instinct, and scooted, on forearms and shins, like a soldier scoots beneath barbed wire, scooted to the side of a parked car and rolled into the gutter between the car’s tires. I lay there, waiting, hoping that somebody had called the police, thinking of Chuckie Lamb bleeding to death in the rain in Washington Square.

Five minutes of waiting, five minutes that seemed like five years, five minutes until the police car came. Two officers picked me off the street and led me to the back seat of their car. I sat there, dazed and bleeding, behind the thick wire division, like a criminal, telling my story to the same young officer who had handled the shattered car window just a few weeks before. Whatever had happened, I knew it was beyond him.

“I want to talk to ADA Slocum,” I said.

“On a crime like this,” said the cop with an annoying condescension, “we don’t bring in the DA until we have a perpetrator.”

“I’m involved in a case he is investigating, Officer,” I leaned forward to read his badge. “Officer 3207. He’ll be very upset if you don’t get hold of him immediately.”

“We’ll see, sir.”

“I don’t want you to see, Officer 3207. I want you to do it this instant. Now. Or the commissioner will hear about it, I promise you.”

Slocum showed up ten minutes later.

“Oh man,” he said, opening the door and sitting beside me in the car. He was in his uniform, navy suit, red tie, rumpled tan raincoat with streaks of black newsprint on his sleeve, where his paper rubbed each morning. “How did I know that trouble was coming to you?”

“This is the second time,” I said.

“So I heard. Why didn’t you let me know about the first?”

“I thought it might have been just an accident.”

“Oh man, you are something,” said Slocum. “Whoever the shooter was, he got away again. Nothing left but two casings from a thirty-eight found across the street. We bagged them and we’ll check for prints, but don’t expect much.”

“What are you going to do?” I asked.

“Me, I’m going back to the office, do some work, maybe grab some lunch later, nothing special. But then nobody’s been shooting at me. The question, Carl, is what are you going to do?”

“I’ve got to get to court.”

“Slow down. You hate to keep Gimbel waiting, sure. But nothing will screw his calendar like the automatic mistrial because you turn up dead. So tell me who might possibly want to kill Victor Carl.”

“They should be taking tickets. Now serving number twenty-six.”

“What about your pal Raffaello?”

I shook my head. “The one guy with no reason, yet,” I said, though he might just decide there was reason enough if I didn’t find out where his money went. “Besides,” I continued, “I asked him about the first shot. He said if he wanted me dead I would have been dead. But Jimmy Moore, I think, would like me to disappear.”

“I don’t doubt it, with the way you went after him yesterday.”

I lit up for a second. “You liked that?”

“Not bad.”

“And then there’s Norvel Goodwin.”

Slocum let out a low whistle. “See, I knew something was up when you started asking about him.”

“He took me for a ride, told me he had an interest in this case and to back off. When I didn’t he left a dachshund with his neck snapped and his belly split on my doorstep.”

“He seems to have a thing for dead animals. Something from his childhood, I guess. But what interest could he have in this case?”

I shrugged.

“Anyone else might want to take a shot at you?” he asked.

“Well, my ex-partner and I are feuding. He’s a murderous fuck.”

“Ex-partners are like that.”

“And of course I owe some money to MasterCard.”

“They can be brutal, I know.”

“I have to get to court.”

“Sure you do,” he said. “I’ll tell the unit to stick around while you put on a clean suit. You have a clean suit, I hope.”

“I never needed more than one before.”

“They’ll escort you to the courthouse. If you need them again on your way home, let me know. I’ll take care of it.”

I nodded at him.

“But before you go,” he said. “I’ve been assigned to the Chuckie Lamb killing. You know anything about that?”

“No,” I said, “not a thing.”

“Because there’s something peculiar. I was listening to the 911 tape and the guy who called the murder in, he sounded a lot like you.”

“Strange coincidence,” I said.

“And a witness spotted a man in a raincoat, about your height and build, running out of Washington Square just before the call.”

“Looks like you got your work cut out for you.”

“You’d tell me if you knew anything, wouldn’t you, Victor?”

“If I knew anything you’d be the first I’d tell,” I said. “After the trial.”

He sat in the car next to me, shaking his head. “And I’m supposed to wait and see if you live that long.” He shook his head some more and then ducked out of the car. He leaned back into the open doorway. “So, Carl, you’ve called a city councilman a liar in court, you’ve made an enemy of the biggest drug kingpin in the city and a friend of the biggest mobster, you’ve had your picture in all the papers, you’ve been interviewed like a sports star on the evening news, you are hiding information about a homicide, and now you’ve been shot at twice. How does it feel to hit the big time?”

He didn’t wait for an answer. He just laughed and shut the door and strolled over to the cops, who were doing what cops do best, standing in a group and talking about where to eat lunch. But I had an answer for him, I could have told him how it felt. Just then, with blood on my shirt and a chilling nausea riding up my throat, just then it felt surprisingly good. The closest I had ever been to the big time before was watching the parade go by when the Phillies won it all in 1980. Well, I wasn’t watching it all go by this time, I was right in the middle of it, maybe getting run over by it, true, but in the middle of it nonetheless, and what I was discovering was that that was just the way I liked it.

When the trial resumed, after gratuitous and insincere inquiries into my well-being, and after I had pulled my notebook and my legal pads and my Federal Criminal Code and Rules from my briefcase, each with a neat round hole through it, Eggert took his turn going after Jimmy. Eggert was very careful in his cross-examination, very deliberate. Bit by bit he went over the story, trying to mold it as much as possible to be consistent with his theory that the extortion and arson and murder were all linked together. It was a very precise, very workmanlike cross. And it was excruciatingly boring.

During one of the many breaks called by the judge to let the yawning jury walk off its drowsiness, I took a stroll down the long courthouse hallway. On my way back I was stopped by Leslie Moore. She was standing with her sister, Renee, but when she saw me she put a hand on Renee’s shoulder and came over. Renee stayed about ten feet away, thick arms crossed over her chest, eyeing us suspiciously.

“Oh, Mr. Carl,” said Leslie. Her voice was sad and soft, the breathless voice of condolence as one passes through the line greeting the family at a funeral. She was wearing a fine tweed suit, her silk shirt buttoned at the collar, and in the way her arms were held tight to her side and her hands clutched at each other there was something of the shackled prisoner about her. “I was so sorry to hear about what happened this morning.”

“Thank you,” I said.

“Do you think you are in danger, for real?”

“I’m being careful where I step,” I said.

“After what happened to Charles we are all very shaken.”

I looked at her carefully, wondering how much she knew. Was there guilt in her eyes? It was Chuckie himself who had told me her problem was that she knew too much, that she knew everything. “It was a tragedy,” I said.

She leaned forward slightly and lifted her arm, placing two fingers very close to the array of bandages around my eye, as close as she could come without touching. There was something so genuine about her concern it was startling, as if she herself had sliced my flesh with a fine-bladed knife.

“Be very careful, Mr. Carl. Please,” she said. “There’s been enough tragedy in too short a time.” Was that a warning or a threat? I couldn’t tell. “And how is your eye?” she asked.

“It’s all right,” I said. “Don’t worry about it, Mrs. Moore.”

“I am a nurse, you know. I don’t practice with patients anymore, but I used to. Maybe I should look at the wound.”

“No, that won’t be necessary,” I said quickly. “Why did you stop practicing?”

“There is enough money now,” she said, smiling tightly. “Besides, after Nadine I lost the heart for it. I lost the heart for everything.”

“I’m sorry,” I said, and immediately felt silly for saying it, as if my offhand words could in any way fill the void.

She looked at her sister, creased her brow, and, without turning back to me, she said, “I want you to know that I don’t resent the way you brought out in the courtroom my husband’s relationship with that woman.”

“I’m only doing what I believe I have to do, Mrs. Moore.”

“I know. And I don’t resent what Chester is doing, either. Tell him, please.”

“He’ll be glad to know,” I said.

“We’ve all been protecting Jimmy for so long that it has become a habit. Like brushing our teeth or going to church. That’s why I can even admire Chester fighting back like he is.” She breathed a deep, sad breath. “Though I am paying part of the cost. My husband is a remarkable man, Mr. Carl, but he is not without flaws. And it is impossible to know how hard these last few years have been on both of us. Nadine was a very bright and lively child. She wrote poetry for her high school literary magazine. She was very special.”

I stopped myself from apologizing again and stayed quiet. There was something she wanted to say and I could see her struggling with it.

She turned to me and took a step forward and put her hand on my forearm. “You do believe him, don’t you, when he says it is over with her?”

“I hope it is so,” I said.

“I believe him, I believe in him. That might be my great flaw, Mr. Carl, but what is there to be done? I don’t have the strength I used to have. But I was a good nurse once.” She smiled at me, leaned even closer, placed her lips very close to my ear. In the whisper of a conspirator she said, “Be very careful, Mr. Carl. Please. It would be horrible if something happened to you. And Chester, too. I’ve heard the voices on the wind. But tell Chester I won’t let them kill him. That he can trust I won’t let them.”

She once again reached her fingers to my bandages and this time touched them gently before walking away, back to her sister. I watched her go, all that sadness go. She deserved better, I thought, and I realized quite suddenly that she thought so too. But I couldn’t help but wonder at those voices in the wind. Time for more lithium, I figured.

Back in the courtroom, as we waited for the jury to reappear, I leaned over to Chester and whispered, “Leslie Moore said something to me over the break about you being in danger. Do you think there is anything to it?”

His head turned quickly and his eyes startled. “From who?”

I shrugged. “She didn’t say. Something about voices on the wind.”

“Probably voices from a bottle.” The way the trial had turned had brought forth from Chet a sarcasm I hadn’t seen before. It was quite becoming on him.

“I’m not taking any chances after this morning,” I said. I had packed all the clothes I would need for a week and loaded them into my car. For the rest of the trial, I decided, I would live like a terrorist on the lam, never two nights in the same place. “And after what happened to Chuckie,” I said to Chester, “you should be careful too.”

He pressed his lips together and nodded.

“Leslie also said she would protect you,” I added as the door to the back hall opened and we stood as the jury filed in.

He turned around to find her sitting directly behind Jimmy. I turned too. Her hands were on her lap, clasping tightly one the other, and her face held the deep cast of a painful concern as she stared back at Chester.

“You can’t know how relieved I am,” he said after turning around again, his face calmly looking forward, “to have her on my side.”

Early in the afternoon, when Eggert finished his cross and the whole courtroom stretched with relief, Prescott rested Jimmy Moore’s defense case.

“We have a few hours before we break for Mr. Lamb’s funeral,” said the judge. “So you can begin to call your witnesses, Mr. Carl.”

The only witness I planned to put on the stand was Veronica. With Chet’s two forgery convictions, Eggert and Prescott both would easily make him out to be a liar if he testified, so everything would depend on her, which was fine by me, except she wasn’t in the courtroom. I had expected I wouldn’t need her until tomorrow.

“Your Honor,” I said. “We will have one witness, but if the court will allow, in light of what occurred to me this morning,” I was milking it but so what, “in light of the events of this morning, and in deference to the Lamb family, we ask that the court be recessed until tomorrow.”

The judge wasn’t happy about it, I could see that, being that it was only two o’clock and he could squeeze in another hour and a half of testimony before the scheduled quitting time, but he seemed willing to go along with my request until the disturbance broke out.

“If you could be giving me just a minute,” shouted Morris from the back of the courtroom, standing in the aisle with his hand up. He was wearing his shabby hat and a crumpled blue suit dusted heavily with dandruff and his tzitzis were hanging down from beneath his too tight jacket. “Just a minute is all I am needing to talk here with Victor.”

One of the marshals, blue blazered, his ear stuffed with ominous plastic, immediately rushed to Morris’s side and took hold of his arm. Prescott ducked and the judge cringed. Now that the community of our courtroom knew I was a marked man a noticeable nervousness had set in.

“What is happening here?” said a surprised Morris, trying to pull his arm away from the marshal. “What? Am I now a criminal?”

“Your Honor,” I said. “Can I have a minute?”

“You know that man?” asked the judge.

“Yes, sir. He is my investigator.”

There was a sudden laugh from the group of young lawyers behind Prescott, from Brett with two t’s and the others, a laugh at just how ludicrous it was that someone like Morris could be an investigator. People in the audience joined in, it spread gaily.

Without thinking I turned on the laughing young lawyers and said, loudly and angrily, “Is something funny, you little pissants?”

It stopped just that fast. There was a peculiar silence, like the whole court had been caught at something, and in the silence I remembered that just three weeks before, when Morris first appeared in court and there had been a snicker, I had turned away in embarrassment.

“Take your minute, Mr. Carl,” said the judge.

I motioned for Morris to come forward, and he did. I leaned over and he stood on his tiptoes and whispered in my ear, “I have for you a witness.”

“Who?” I asked.

“Your friend, Miss Beth, she gave me a paper and I showed it to the man.”

“A subpoena?”

“Because of such paper he agreed to come with me, but I fear, Victor, that if you don’t use him now he won’t be back tomorrow.”

“Who is it?”

“Mr. Gardner, a very nice man, actually, though he pretends to be not so nice. You should maybe, Victor, I’m no lawyer, but maybe you should call this man before he decides he doesn’t want to be here anymore.”

“What is this about?”

“You ask this Mr. Gardner some questions, Victor.”

He handed me four pieces of paper, a yellow original and three copies.

“Miss Beth said you would be needing more than one. I’ll be charging, of course, for the copies. A quarter they cost in this building. Gonifs, and our own government too.” Then he turned and went to the back of the courtroom and sat down again.

I looked over the original document briefly. Still puzzled, I said, “Your Honor, on behalf of Chester Concannon I call Mr. Leonard Gardner to the stand.”

He was a tall, middle-aged man with a fine suit and shiny black loafers. His hair was curly and very tightly trimmed. There was something hard about him, something defiant and angry. He had been put upon for too long and was not going to take it anymore, dammit. But even so he was walking up the courtroom aisle and slipping into the witness stand.

He answered the usual questions, checking his nails, letting out the arrogant sigh of a man whose time was being wasted. He was Leonard Gardner, G-A-R-D-N-E-R, he lived at 408 North 3rd Street, he was a businessman, primarily in fashion, importing certain fabrics from Pakistan.

“Now, Mr. Gardner, on the night of May ninth of this year, did you by chance rent a limousine from the Cherry Hill Limousine Company in Cherry Hill, New Jersey?”

“I don’t know specific dates,” he said. His voice was a near sneer. “How am I supposed to know what night May ninth was?”

“It was the night Bissonette’s nightclub burned down. Does that help?”

“No.” His shoulders hiccuped in a snort and his gaze rose, as if he were required to inspect the ceiling for cracks.

“Well, maybe this will refresh your recollection.”

I marked the original document into evidence and tossed a copy each to Prescott and Eggert. Then I handed the marked document to the witness. “Do you know what that is, Mr. Gardner?”

“It looks like an invoice for the rental of a limousine.”

“On May ninth of this year, is that right?”

“Yes.”

“Have you ever seen this invoice before?”

“This afternoon. The man in the back with the funny hat showed it to me.”

“You mean Mr. Kapustin.”

“That’s his name, right. Kapustin.”

“Does this document refresh your recollection as to whether or not you rented a limousine on May ninth of this year?”

“Well, my signature’s on it, so I guess I did.”

“And you signed for the limousine.”

“That’s what I said.”

“And though you live in Philadelphia, you went all the way to New Jersey for a limousine?”

“That’s where I went, yeah. What about it?”

“Where did you go that night, Mr. Gardner?”

“We went out to dinner and then drove around. I had just closed a large deal for a shipment from Karachi and we were celebrating. That against the law?”

“Where did you have dinner?”

“I don’t remember. The Garden maybe, or someplace. I do remember that the veal was overdone and the wine a little too impertinent, if that’s what you want to know. A definite two forks only, no more than that.”

“And after dinner where did you go?”

“I don’t know. I possibly celebrated a bit too hard that night. I seem to recollect I fell asleep in the car. I spilled champagne on my suit, too. A nasty stain. Ruined it. Twelve hundred dollars.”

At that moment Eggert stood up. “Your Honor, I object. There is testimony of a limousine rental on the night of the fire. I will stipulate that limousines were rented on the night of the fire. Beyond that, however, I don’t see how Mr. Gardner’s testimony is relevant.”

“Mr. Carl,” said the judge, “are you going to link this up any further?”

“I hope so,” I said.

“The law doesn’t traffic in hopes, Mr. Carl,” said the judge. “Either tell me you can link it up or the testimony will be stricken.”

I turned around and gave a shrug to Morris.

From his seat, he shook his head with sadness. Slowly he stood up and started the long walk toward me. The whole courtroom was watching him now. He had planned it this way, I thought, and I didn’t know whether to hug him or wring his neck. When he reached me I leaned over to him and he again stood on his tiptoes.

“Don’t be a goyishe kopf, Victor. Ask him who the person he was with that night was.”

Morris shook his head some more, shook it at all the goyishe kopfs in the world, turned around, and slowly walked again to the back of the courtroom.

“I’ll link up the testimony with just a few more questions, Your Honor.”

“Get to it, Mr. Carl.”

“Who were you with that night in your limousine, Mr. Gardner?”

“I had a date.”

“Who?”

“None of your business,” he said.

“I’m afraid it is, Mr. Gardner.”

He turned to the judge and in an aggrieved voice said, “Must I go into personal matters? Is that necessary?”

“Is it necessary, Mr. Carl?” asked the judge.

I turned to find Morris sitting in the back of the courtroom. His eyes rose in exasperation and with a series of flicks from his hand he urged me on.

“I’m afraid so,” I said.

“You must answer the question, Mr. Gardner,” said the judge.

“And it doesn’t matter who it hurts? It doesn’t matter if my date has been happily married to another for twenty years, that doesn’t matter, I am still required to tell it all to the tabloids?”

“Answer the question, Mr. Gardner,” said the judge.

“So tell us, Mr. Gardner,” I said as he turned back to me and dared me with his eyes to ask the question again. “Who were you with in the limousine that night?”

“This is personal,” he said. “I don’t believe in all this so-called outing going on, angry young men invading other people’s lives. I don’t care, really, but others do and it’s not right. The Constitution applies to us, too. We might as well be living in Colorado.”

“I’m sorry, Mr. Gardner,” I said. “But please answer the question. Who was with you in the limousine that night?”

There was a long pause and a sigh and a shake of the head. He laughed to himself and then shrugged. “All right, then.”

“Who, Mr. Gardner?”

“Michael,” he said. “I was with Michael that night.”

“Michael who?”

“Michael Ruffing.”

There was a gasp just then. It wasn’t loud, it didn’t last long, but I heard it in all its sharpness and pain. And I didn’t have to look to see who it came from. It hadn’t come from any member of the jury, or from Prescott, or from Jimmy or Chester or the judge. It had come from the long pale throat of Marshall Eggert, who had just seen his arson claims against Concannon and Moore disappear and had just seen the credibility of Michael Ruffing, his star witness, who on the night of the fire at Bissonette’s had been in a limousine much like the one seen leaving after the arson and who had used the insurance proceeds to pay his tax bill and stay out of jail, the credibility of that Michael Ruffing be crushed to scrap by the aggrieved voice of Leonard Gardner.

52

ON MY WAY OUT of the courtroom Prescott stopped me by grabbing hold of my arm. I looked down at his hand reaching around my biceps, but he held it steady there with a tight grip despite the force of my gaze. I could have said something sharp and clever just then if I had thought of it as he gripped my arm, but nothing sprang to mind, so I stayed quiet.

“Nice bit of investigation, pulling out that Gardner fellow,” he said finally. “You’re a constant source of surprise.”

“I’m just shocked that with all the resources of Talbott, Kittredge and Chase you didn’t find it yourself.”

“Maybe we did.”

“But why blame Ruffing when it was so much more convenient to put the arson off on Chester?”

“You subpoenaed Veronica Ashland,” he said in a low, dangerous voice.

“That’s right.”

“My advice, for what it’s worth…”

“Not much anymore,” I said.

“My advice, Victor, is not to call her. You know, of course, if you do call her to testify I’ll have no option but to bring out your sordid affair with her.” I had figured they had known, but I looked away from him anyway. On the other side of the courtroom, through a watery blur, I could see Jimmy Moore talking with a small group of supporters but staring at me as hard as a hypnotist. “The jury will think that rather strange,” Prescott continued, “calling your lover as a witness.”

“Our relationship is in the past. It ended the instant I realized she had information relevant to this case. But whatever the jury thinks, they’ll think she’s telling the truth.”

“Her testimony is not going to be all you expect.”

“I think we’ll give her a shot.”

“She doesn’t want to testify.”

“That’s why God invented the subpoena.”

“Jimmy doesn’t want her to testify.”

“I’m sure of that,” I said.

“We seem to have the damnedest time communicating, Victor. I apologize if I’m not being clear. Jimmy has told me that he is worried about the pressure of testifying on her fragile physical condition. He believes that forcing her to testify at this most difficult time in her life could be dangerous to her health.”

“That sounds like a threat.”

“Don’t be silly. But Jimmy wanted you to be aware of all the possible consequences of putting that girl on the stand.”

“Because if that’s a threat,” I went on, “that would be obstruction of justice.”

“I was just voicing a concern that had been explained to me by my client.”

“Maybe I should call Eggert over here, and Special Agent Stemkowski. Maybe you could voice Jimmy’s concern to them.”

He smiled at me. “That won’t be necessary,” he said, then he turned around and walked over to his client. It would have been a small moment of triumph for me, except for that smile. It wasn’t a nervous smile, there was no tension in it, no worry. It was a chess player’s smile, as if he had opened with P-Q4, I had countered with P-Q4 and he had replied with P-QB4, offering his queenside bishop’s pawn for capture. I had played enough chess in the geekdom of my youth to know the price of accepting that pawn. His smile was the smile that invariably accompanies a gambit and I didn’t like it one bit.

Morris was waiting for me outside the courtroom. He had agreed to drive with me to the office, my protector now that I was under attack. The thought of Morris protecting me was oddly comforting. I was going straight to the office because I had decided to skip Chuckie’s funeral, decided for the best of all possible reasons: naked fear. Together Morris and I walked down the hall to the elevator.

“You could have told me what Gardner’s testimony would be at the first,” I said

“So where would be such fun in that?”

“This isn’t fun. I’m dying here and you’re talking about fun.”

“Such kvetching. You drew it out of him in the end. A lawyer as grand as yourself, Victor, I knew you would be getting to the bottom of what he had for the telling.”

I looked around the hallway. “Where’s Beth? Have you seen her?”

“I sent her off on a little errand,” said Morris.

“To pick up your dry cleaning?”

“That too needs doing,” he said. “Now quiet please, I have news for you from Corpus Christi.”

“You found Stocker?” I asked.

Morris stopped walking, took out his glasses and little notebook, and searched through the notebook’s pages and the scraps stuck inside those pages for his notes. “Aaah, yes. Here it is.” He pulled out a piece of envelope with a tight scrawling over it and began walking again, squinting through his glasses all the while at the tiny print. “It seems there is a Mr. Cavanaugh at the Downtown Marina on a Bay Shore Drive in Corpus Christi that bears a striking resemblance to our Mr. Stocker. This Mr. Cavanaugh is in a thirty-six-foot sailboat. He sailed over from the west coast of Florida. He is renting his berth at the marina by the week. He has no visitors, no friends, he drinks like a carp, and talks of sailing to South America. And this Mr. Cavanaugh makes calls from the marina’s pay phone, which just happens to be the same number that has placed calls to that Mr. Prescott whose office you burgled like a cat.”

“And you think Cavanaugh is Stocker?”

“Of course I think that, such a dorfying you are sometimes, Victor. Why else am I telling all this to you?” We reached the elevators and Morris pushed the down button. “But whether it is so or not, we can only know by going down and finding out.”

“So go,” I said.

“No, thank you,” said Morris. “Where would I eat in Corpus Christi? You think they got a kosher deli in Corpus Christi? You think they got pastrami in Corpus Christi?”

“You’re not going down?”

“After this trial, maybe, you and Miss Beth can make the trip.”

“Why not now?” I said. “It doesn’t do us any good if you find out that it’s him and then he sails away to Paraguay.”

“From what we know it doesn’t look like he is going anywhere too fast,” said Morris. “Besides, he can’t be sailing off to Paraguay.”

“And why not?” I asked.

“There is no seaport in Paraguay,” said Morris. “It is in the mountains.”

“So now you’re the geography wizard?”

“I had reason to be searching once for criminals in Paraguay.”

“What, Morris, you were a Nazi hunter?” I asked through my laughter. “You were searching the mountains of Paraguay for wayward German colonels?”

“Yes,” said Morris in a cold voice that shut me up quick. We stood there in an awkward silence while Morris stared at me until I began looking down at the scuffs on my shoes. The elevator came, breaking the moment, but before I could enter it Eggert grabbed hold of my arm and yanked me aside.

“Are you still interested in a deal?” he asked.

“What are you offering?”

“Plead guilty to extortion only, testify against the councilman, we’ll recommend minimum jail time. I’ll even talk to the U.S. Attorney about probation.”

“Gardner’s testimony shook you up a little, hey, Marshall?”

“Not at all,” he said, but his hand was in his pocket and his change was jingling out a very different tune. “It’s inconclusive at best.”

“Maybe. But your taxi driver witness said the limo he saw flashed his brights, like a signal, as if it were hoping to be noticed. And now we know that Ruffing, who collected the insurance on the property, was tooling around that night in a black limousine. It doesn’t take a brain surgeon to see the connection. Your arson just disappeared from the case, and so, probably, did the racketeering charge. Now you want my client to plead to the only real charge left.”

He sniffed twice. “It’s a good deal, Carl.”

“This trial has come down to either or. It’s either Moore or Concannon. The only way for you to get both is for one to plead and rat out the other. Sit tight, Marshall. We’ll talk after my witness tomorrow. If she is all I expect, tomorrow you’ll be offering immunity and be damn glad to give it.”

I walked away, not waiting for a response. A week before I would have jumped at his offer, leaped at it like Charles Barkley leaping for a rebound, but it wasn’t a week before anymore. I was back in the game, I was on a roll, and tomorrow I was going up for the winning score.

53

IT WAS A COLD GRAY MORNING, a winter morning at the tail end of the fall. My breath fled in wispy clouds as I walked from the underground parking garage beside the courthouse to the Society Hill Sheraton, where Veronica was hiding out. It was a peculiar place to hide, a large but not tall brick building with a wide and active lobby, from which guests in tracksuits flowed out through the glass doors and around the courtyard to run along the Delaware River. Morris told me he would be in the gray Honda, waiting for me. I spotted it resting at the end of a long line of cars parked across the wide cobblestone street from the front of the hotel. All the cars but Morris’s faced the curb; Morris had backed the Honda in so he could see the front of the lobby without twisting.

“Anything?” I asked.

“You didn’t bring mine coffee?” said Morris.

“I forgot, I’m sorry.”

“The first rule in surveillance, Victor, the very first rule. Never forget the coffee.”

“I’ll get you some coffee.”

“Stop, don’t be worrying yourself. It is the first rule, but it is maybe not such a very good rule, because once it goes in it has to go out, which is very inconvenient, believe you me, in the middle of a following. When are you wanting her in the courtroom?”

“This morning, ten o’clock.”

“Does she want to go?”

“I’ll talk to her, she’ll come. All right, let’s go get her.”

“Hold your horses,” said Morris.

“Hold your horses?”

“Yes, hold your horses. That’s a very fine expression, I think. What, I couldn’t have been a cowboy? I would have been some cowboy.”

“Have you ever ridden a horse, Morris?”

“What’s to riding a horse, you tell me? I can sit, I can hold onto the straps, I can say go and stop, I can ride. Look over there, by the front driveway.”

“The silver BMW?”

“Such a car I should own. Beautiful, no? Except for that it is German it is a wonderful car.”

“Why are we admiring a car?”

“Because it has been parked there all morning. Just sitting there, but for when one of the men left for a few minutes and came back with coffee.”

“You think they’re watching the lobby entrance?”

“The coffee was what gave it away to me,” said Morris. “Already you’re forgetting the first rule of surveillance.”

“They could be waiting for anyone,” I said.

“They could, yes.”

“But they might also be Jimmy’s people.”

“That too.”

“No one but Jimmy and us should know she’s there. Maybe we should go in from the back.”

“I think it’s important that we know who’s in that car, don’t you?”

“Why?”

“You told me there’s a valise full of money missing, floating free, is such a fact?”

“A quarter of a million dollars.”

“Well, Victor, I may be wrong, I’m often wrong, just ask Rosalie and she’ll tell you, just bump into her in the street and…”

“What are you thinking, Morris?” I said.

“I would bet that whoever has that money is the one who sent those people in that fancy car to sit there watching.”

I took a closer look at the silver BMW. “You think so?”

“I just said it, didn’t I? So what I am thinking is that you should walk into the front of the hotel so that who is in that car can see you. Then maybe we will know who is so interested.”

“I’ve been shot at twice already, don’t you think that twice is enough?”

“Don’t you worry about a thing. I am here, Morris Kapustin, and I will be covering you.”

“You’re going to cover me? With what, Morris, with a kosher dill?”

I expected one of his witty retorts about Jews and pickles, but that’s not what I got. Instead, Morris gave me a cold look and from his great black coat pulled out an automatic pistol. Its blued barrel gave off a dull, oily shine. With one quick and practiced motion he ejected the clip and snapped it back into the handle.

“Jesus, Morris, what are you doing with that?”

“You maybe never heard of Jabotinsky?”

“No.”

“There are many things you must learn, Victor. One shouting in court is not enough to prove you have learned all you need to learn. You still must learn about what it means to be a Jew and what it does not mean. You have much thinking to do about your life and yourself and your heritage, but not today. Today you will walk into the front of the lobby, slowly, as if you had not a care in the world. Don’t be looking at the car, just walk in and we’ll see what happens. If nothing happens, I will meet you outside her room, number 4016. Now go.”

I hesitated, but Morris literally pushed me out of the car and I was on my way, headed across the wide cobblestone street for the hotel. It was still cold, my breath still steamed in the frigid morning air, but I was sweating. I opened my lined raincoat as I walked to the round courtyard and tried not to stare at the silver BMW, sitting by the front, ominous, as frightening as a shark in shallow water. My neck twitched as I approached. Look straight ahead, Morris had told me, and that was what I did even as I passed the dangerous chrome grill. And then I was beyond it, fighting the urge to look back, heading straight for the entrance. But before I could reach for the long bronze handle to get me inside a car door slammed shut to my right and I heard the shout.

“Yo Vi’tor Carl, the man with two first names.”

The voice was familiar, slippery, and thick, it eased its way around the consonants, approaching then veering off just before it would have grabbed hold of them. I stopped in dread and turned. It was Wayman, Norvel Goodwin’s henchman, who had driven me around in the councilman’s limo and then smacked me in the face with the back of his hand. Which meant, if Morris was right, that Norvel Goodwin had the missing quarter of a million. How the hell had he gotten his talons on all that money?

Wayman was wearing a black and purple tracksuit, high-top leather sneakers, a sweatshirt draped over his right arm, hiding his hand and whatever his hand was holding. He was hustling toward me in a kind of a skipping step. By the time my frozen nerves thawed enough for me to even think of dashing into the lobby he was by my side.

“How’s that eye, Vi’tor? It looks like it’s all healed. Maybe you tougher than you look.”

“What do you want, Wayman?”

“Now that’s nice. That’s very very nice. You ’member my name. Where you headed, Vi’tor Carl? You got some fine looking female stashed in the Society Hill Sher’ton? You up for some early morning twist?”

“I have a meeting.”

“I just bet you do. Yes I do. We’d figured you’d be coming to visit Ronnie girl. Couldn’t listen now, could you, couldn’t say no. Even after I dropped that dog on your lap. Well, now, I can’t blame you, she’s not butt-ugly. But Mr. Goodwin, you ’member Mr. Goodwin, he aks’d me to kick it back and wait right here for you, so’s to tell you that he don’t want Ronnie to be testifying in court. He don’t want Ronnie screwing up his plans with our councilman or mentioning his name to the federales. There are things you are interfering with that you shouldn’t be interfering with. You still not getting the least idea of what’s going on here.”

“You’re right,” I said. “I’m not.”

“’Course not, or else you wouldn’t been so stupid as trying and make her testify. But now you know, and Mr. Goodwin, he ’xpects you’re going to be a thorough person.”

“I have to go inside, I’m sorry.”

“Now, see man, that’s what I’m talking about, hey? You deaf, Vi’tor Carl, or are you just dissing me right here? I hope not, because if that be it I’m a-gonna kill you, just like I killed your little pigeon buddy Chuckie.”

I stepped back at that, my spine suddenly crawling with so many earthworms they could have dug my back for bait. I glanced behind me, looking for Morris’s cover, but I didn’t see him. Wayman caught my glance and misinterpreted it.

“You can run, Vi’tor Carl, oh yes,” he said, stepping toward me. “If I was you I’d be booking too. Be my guest and run, run away, run, Vi’tor Carl, run as fast as you can. Run anywhere you want, just as so you not be running inside the Society Hill Sher’ton. What’s inside the Society Hill Sher’ton is for us to worry about. You take my advice, Vi’tor Carl, and you start running.”

I stepped back again, stepped out of his reach, and decided I would indeed take his advice. Oh, I hated the idea of turning tail and letting Wayman see me kicking my butt with my heels as I ran away from the front of that hotel, but I hated the idea of Wayman doing to me what he did to Chuckie a whole lot more. I believe I’ve mentioned before that I am not, by nature, a brave man, but even the least cowardly would have run in the same situation. There was Wayman, with his anger and his tracksuit and his hand curled around who knows what wrapped in the sweatshirt draped over his arm, and there sat a confederate in the silver BMW, a white lug with ferocious eyes and hands tapping on the steering wheel like a drummer, just waiting to come to Wayman’s aid if any aid was needed, and there was my memory of the way Chuckie had died, the way his blood had puddled on the stone before being washed clean by the rain. And there I stood, defenseless, depending on Morris to cover me, Morris, who had apparently disappeared. This Jabotinsky of his must not have been much of a fighter, I figured, if all Morris had learned from him was when to retreat. So I was about to take Wayman’s advice and run from him and the drummer when I heard one of the hotel’s doors opening behind me and a familiar voice.

“Excuse me, sirs, but I was wondering if you might could help me as I am looking for the house belonging once to Miss Betsy Ross?”

Wayman looked over my shoulder and I turned. There was Morris waddling toward us, his great black coat open and flapping, his fedora pushed to the back of his head, a small map, which he was struggling to open, in his hands.

“Mine granddaughter she told me I must take her to this Miss Betsy Ross’s house,” continued Morris. “But this meshuggeneh map, which I can’t even begin to open for all the flaps and sections and pages, this map it tells me nothing except that Morris you are a schlemiel who never learned to read a map like an ordinary person.”

He was giving me an opening and I took it. “It’s north of here, on Arch Street,” I said.

“North, south, what do I know from directions,” said Morris. “Thank you, sir, but north might as well be up for all I can tell.” He continued fumbling with his map.

“Come along inside,” I said. “I’ll draw it on the map for you.”

“That won’t be necessary,” said Wayman, his voice deep and precise now, the voice of a college lecturer. “It’s very simple. Go out this little street. Take a right, that’s north, and go down four blocks, until you hit Arch Street. Then take a left. It is a little brick house with a small courtyard on the far side of Arch Street, between Second and Third. There is a colonial flag out front, you can’t miss it.”

I looked at Wayman, flabbergasted by his new voice. He smiled a dangerous smile at me and suddenly, with Wayman having fled from even the shallowest pretense of my comprehension, I was absolutely terrified.

“Aah, thank you, sir, thank you,” continued Morris. “I should write that down but already it is gone from mine head. Mine memory is like a sieve with a hole in the middle, that bad. If you could just show me on the map, if you could just…”

He continued to fumble with the map, struggling to open it, and then, with a sudden, frustrated jerk, his elbows flared and the paper ripped with a quick rasping tear and there were now two confused and jumbled pieces of map where before there had been only one.

“Accht, this is just like me,” said Morris, staring forlornly at the pieces in his hand. “Now I must to get another one inside. And then, if it is not asking too much to help a visitor, then if one of you gentlemen can draw the way on the map, that would maybe let me get there without going first through Pittsburgh.”

“Sure,” I said, grabbing hold of his arm. “Let’s go.”

“That would be just peaches, yes,” said Morris.

“We’re not finished here, Victor Carl,” said Wayman.

“I’ll be right back, Wayman,” I said as I headed for the entrance. “Just wait.”

Morris maneuvered so that he was between Wayman and me as we headed for the doors. In the glass’s reflection I could see Wayman reaching over Morris’s shoulder for me, and then I could feel his hand grabbing the collar of my shirt, could feel the cloth tighten around my neck. My throat let out a surprised little squeak.

Just then a doorman passed us on his way out from the lobby and seemed to accidentally knock Wayman’s arm away. The doorman had huge shoulders, he was dressed in green, he stepped in front of Wayman and said, “Can I help you, sir?” The doorman’s voice was startlingly familiar and even as Morris pushed me inside ahead of him I turned and saw the broad back of the doorman and the yarmulke on his head. The doorman placed his hand on Wayman’s chest. “Is there anything I can do for you, sir?” said Sheldon Kapustin to Wayman as Wayman jerked his head in frustration while Morris and I escaped to inside the lobby.

“Don’t run now,” said Morris. “Like a hawk he is watching.”

“It would have been nice if you had told me Sheldon was inside,” I said. “Sweat stains are so hard to clean. And even so you took your time.”

“Was there a rush?” Morris pointed to the right, where the front desk sat, out of the view of the doors. We scooted around the lobby furniture, wrought-iron tables and thick couches, and headed straight for the desk. “I will be feeling in mine pocket for a pen until we are out of sight from the door,” said Morris as we walked. “And when we are where he can’t see us anymore, then we will run.”

Which is exactly what we did.

“Who was he?” asked Morris on the elevator to the fourth floor.

“He’s an enforcer for a drug dealer.”

“So this drug dealer then has the missing money?”

“Evidently, and he killed a man already to keep me from finding out about it.”

“Ahhh, now this is worse than your original telling.”

“But he shouldn’t know Veronica was here.”

“So how did he learn?” asked Morris as the elevator doors slid open at the fourth floor.

“I don’t know,” I said.

“Careful now,” said Morris, and I followed him down the empty carpeted hallway. At Room 4016 he pointed at me. I shook my head. He knocked lightly on the door.

“Yes?” said the voice from inside.

“I’m sorry, miss,” said Morris, “but I need to be checking on the heat inside your room.”

“One minute,” she said and one minute later the door opened and a loosely draped Veronica, still wet from the shower, peered out. Before she could slam the door in my face I stuck one Florsheim wing tip in the opening. What they don’t tell you in vacuum cleaner salesman school is that sticking your foot in the door can hurt like hell, but pain or no pain it worked.

“You’ve been subpoenaed to appear in court today to testify,” I said when Morris and I were inside her room, the door locked and chained behind us.

“Who’s he?” she said, motioning with her head at Morris. She was wrapped in a light silk robe, her arms were crossed on her chest. Her hair fell flat and clean against her beautiful shoulders. I could barely stop myself from dropping to my knees before her, she was that beautiful.

“He’s a friend who is here to protect you,” I said.

“How comforting,” she said.

“Thank you, miss,” said Morris, ignoring her sarcasm.

“Who is he protecting me from, Victor? From you?”

“From Goodwin. His men are outside. He doesn’t want you to testify.”

“Fuck,” she said in a desperate voice. “Dammit, Victor. See what you’re doing to me.” She walked back into the room and sat on the far bed.

I followed her, like I seemed always to be following her, and stood beside the bed. Morris stayed by the door, listening to the outside, so we were talking in private. “He is probably going to kill you whether you testify or not,” I said quietly. “At least that is what it sounded like. How much do you owe him, Veronica?”

She shrugged her shoulders even as she hugged her chest and wouldn’t look at me. “Not too much,” she said unconvincingly.

“Is there ever too much for you?” I said.

She said nothing, her gaze still on the floor.

“Tell me something else, Veronica. How did Goodwin end up with the missing quarter of a million?”

“Is that who has it?”

“You didn’t know?”

She shook her head. “I was just holding it for Jimmy in the account.”

“The one with Chester’s name on it?”

“Right, but then he asked for it back, said he needed it all.”

“But first he wanted it in an account with Chester’s name on it. Setting Concannon up for the fall from the start, just in case.”

“I never knew what Jimmy did with the money,” she said.

“How would Goodwin have gotten it?”

“He must have stolen it somehow,” she said with a shrug.

“No,” I said. “I don’t think so.” I looked around her fancy hotel room: two king-size beds, color TV, easy chairs, and velour curtains, and began wondering. “You’ve been here a couple days now. Have you been buying any crap from Goodwin?”

“No, not from him, Jesus. One of the reasons I decided to leave was to get away from him and his damn dead animals.”

“So only Jimmy knows you’re here.”

“And you.”

“Yes, and me. But I wasn’t the guy who told Goodwin.”

She looked up at me questioningly. I shrugged. Her eyes opened wide and she shook her head. I nodded my head sadly. She screwed up her face in incomprehension, but then it started working, like the surface of an old computer, lights flashing, tapes winding, as the logic of it all unfolded for her, one syllogism after another, leading ultimately to a look of shock. Jimmy Moore had set her up, her face said, the bastard had put her in this hotel so that Goodwin could take care of both their troubles. Her head shook no, it couldn’t be. But she knew it could be, she knew it was. She turned from me quickly and began to cry. It was that moment, for the first time really, that I knew Veronica Ashland would tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth on the witness stand.

I bent over to pick up some of her clothes off the floor and took them to the suitcase laying open on the top of the bureau.

“Nu?” said Morris from the door. “Is she coming?”

“No,” said Veronica weakly.

“She’s coming,” I said.

“If she is coming then she must come now,” said Morris. “Because I think that maybe our nice friend from outside might decide to force his way past Sheldon and come up here himself to find out what is happening.”

“Who exactly is outside?” she asked.

“Wayman,” I said. “And he’s the one who killed Chuckie.”

That ended all hesitation; in ninety seconds her bag was packed, she was in a pair of jeans, a shirt, her overcoat, and we were out of the room, running down the hallway, following Morris.

“Where are we going?” she asked me.

“Damned if I know,” I said.

As we ran, we heard an elevator opening. We ran away from the elevator, around a corner and another. By the time we turned the last corner and reached the stairs we could hear a door banging and Wayman’s thick and slippery voice yelling, “Open up, bitch. Open the fuck up.”

We rushed down the stairs, Morris leading as quickly as he could, which was quicker than I would have thought, down two flights. The sign said no reentry from stairwell, but Morris pulled open the door to the second floor, snapping tape off the lock as he went by, and we stumbled through the doorway after him, into the hallway, and a quick left to the room beside the stairwell, Room 2082, where Morris, without knocking, pushed open the door and rushed inside. We fell in after him, as if sucked in by a vacuum. The door closed quietly but quickly behind us.

The room was the same as Veronica’s, same size, same furnishings, same two huge beds, same color TV. The door to the bathroom was closed, the window curtains drawn. Morris locked and bolted the door behind us.

“Okay now, Miss Veronica,” said Morris. “You must give to me your fine coat.”

“My overcoat?” she said.

“Yes, of course. By now they have people watching the front and the back, there is no way out. So what we need is what is called in the profession the holtzene kochka. A wooden duck.”

“A decoy?”

“That’s it, yes. The holtzene kochka.”

“Who?” I asked.

“Why, you, of course, Victor,” he said. “And someone else to look like Miss Veronica, and for that we need the overcoat.”

“With all due respect, Morris, I don’t think you’ll pass.”

“Don’t be so much the cham, Victor. You think I would let myself be the holtzene kochka? You don’t live as long as I have lived in this business setting up yourself as the holtzene kochka. No, rule number two is that the detective is never the holtzene kochka. Maybe that should be rule number one and the coffee rule number two. The numbering, sometimes, it gets so confusing.”

“Then who?” I asked.

Just then the bathroom door opened and out she walked in jeans and a wig, a brown wig with soft shoulder-length hair, hair that was styled exactly to match Veronica’s. Beth. It was more than strange, my best friend styled to look like the lover of my dreams, a disorienting blend of comfort and kink. In a way, standing there, framed by the bathroom door, was my ideal woman, a fusion of all I could ever want or love. So I stared for a bit and then a bit longer, stared until Beth started to giggle, which broke the mood and let my fantasies slip away until I realized why she was there.

“No,” I said. “Not Beth. Absolutely not.”

54

WAYMAN SPOTTED US as we ran out the hotel’s front door. I held tight to the suitcase. Veronica’s unbuttoned overcoat swung like a cape behind us. Before Wayman could catch us we were in the Honda, windows closed, engine straining in rhythmic moans to life. He had just reached the car, his huge gun waving in our general direction, when I popped it into gear and shot out.

I took a quick turn left on Walnut and another left up 4th Street. I raced past Spruce Street, past Lombard, ran a red at South Street, and kept going. I hadn’t gone but two blocks past South before the silver BMW was cruising behind us and gaining.

At Washington I spun into a right turn and headed west, BMW tight behind. It rammed me once as I tore along Washington, then once more. I ran another red and the Beemer followed and I wondered where the cops were, wondered where the closest donut shop was, and then with a screech of tire I turned down 7th and slammed on my brakes smack in front of the Sons of Garibaldi Men’s Club.

The silver BMW came to a turning stop right behind us and Wayman jumped out as if his seat was afire. I barely had the time to open my door before he stuck his arm in, jabbing the point of a huge switchblade knife into my throat. The drummer was guarding the passenger door, grinning into the window.

“Run from me again, Vi’tor Carl, you just try and run from me again without I say so and I’ll slice another smile in your motherfucking neck.”

I tried to say something but with the knife sticking into my larynx and me shaking like a stripper nothing came out.

“But don’t you worry yourself, it’s all cool now. Ronnie, sweetie, let’s you and I take a little drive, what you say?”

Beth turned from the drummer to face Wayman and Wayman’s jaw dropped and when he spoke his voice was deep and precise with shock.

“Who are you, lady?”

“She’s my partner,” I managed to get out between shakes.

“Get the fuck out of here,” he said, and then he added, “Shit,” drawing out the word until the T just disappeared. “Where is she, Vi’tor Carl? Tell me now or your neck be history. Tell me, Vi’tor Carl.” He twisted the knifepoint into my neck, almost lifting me from the car seat. I could feel a line of blood run down my throat. “Tell me quick, tell me now, tell me, tell me, tell me. Tell me, Vi’tor Carl, my knife here it is thirsty once again and it don’t got much more patience.”

I was about to tell him something when a thick, hairy hand landed on Wayman’s shoulder. Beth gasped, or maybe it was me, I couldn’t tell. There was something obscene about that hand landing there, like a bony spider. The pressure of the knifepoint slipped from my neck and when Wayman turned to see what it was the hand slid over and grabbed hold of his neck. Before Wayman could say a word of complaint, the hand’s owner slammed a brick into Wayman’s head. Blood burst from Wayman’s forehead. The blow sent him spinning away from the car, his knife sliding with a sweet scrabble across the asphalt. The man with the brick was Dominic and for the first time ever I saw him smile.

It was not a pleasant sight.

I swiveled to check the drummer on the other side of the car, but he was no longer leering inside the window. Instead he was being lifted in a great bear hug, his arms struggling futilely against the pin of some giant whose waist only I could see through the passenger window.

“Step on out, Victor,” I heard Dominic say and when I got out I saw him sitting on top of Wayman, his knees holding Wayman’s arms to the ground, his bony hands tight around Wayman’s throat.

“Hey, Dominic, where do you want this package?” asked the man bear-hugging the drummer. From behind the thug’s shoulders I could see it was Giovanni, his hard face illuminated now with a wide grin.

“Throw it in the garbage,” said Dominic, hands still around Wayman’s throat.

Jasper leaned over Wayman, still held down by Dominic, and started searching him. He reached into Wayman’s sweatpants and pulled out the huge revolver I had seen Wayman brandishing before I had kicked the Honda into gear and fled from the hotel. “Whoa, what do you know?” said Jasper. “What a nasty piece of work this little shit is.”

Jasper checked the gun, unloaded it shell by shell, and then took hold of the barrel. He raised the gun about a foot and a half and dropped the butt end onto Wayman’s shoulder blade. Wayman shouted out something wild and started struggling, cursing even as Dominic’s hands tightened around his neck. Jasper lifted the gun again, just a foot and a half, and let it drop. He hammered at the shoulder blade again, and again, raising the gun a foot and a half and dropping it, over and over and over.

There was a loud crack, Wayman let out a howl and his right arm went dead.

Calmly, methodically, raising the gun the same height of a foot and a half and then dropping it over and over, Jasper went to work on the other shoulder. There was a practiced air about his movements, the fulfillment of a familiar and somewhat pleasant chore.

“Jesus, this feels good,” said Dominic, still atop the struggling Wayman. He couldn’t help but smile again, a smile filled with satisfied blood lust.

I rubbed at my neck, my hand came away slick with my own blood.

“It’s not too often us old goombahs get a chance to work out,” said Dominic.

“What we need,” said Jasper as he kept hammering at the collarbone, “is a gym, you know, a few weights, a ring to spar in, a punching bag.”

“You got the punching bag right there,” said Dominic.

“I need something tougher, something with heft,” said Jasper over Wayman’s shouts. “Something to give me a real workout.”

Across the street Giovanni was slamming the drummer’s head into the side of a construction dumpster once, twice, thrice for good effect. Then he lifted him like a sack of lime and threw him in.

“What is going on, Victor?” said Beth, who was also out of the car. “What just happened?”

“We’ve been saved by the cavalry,” I said. “Beth, I want you to meet some friends. The young kid is Giovanni, the fellow banging on our friend Wayman is Jasper.”

Just then there was another sickening crack and Wayman let out a desperate wild howl.

Wayman had killed Chuckie, had stuck the point of his knife far enough into my neck to draw blood, had promised to kill me, but even still I couldn’t help but wince.

“And this here is Dominic,” I continued. “Don’t play poker with Dominic, Beth, he’s a shark.”

“A weekend player,” said Dominic as he rose from the helpless Wayman, slapping his hands clean. “Here you go, pal,” he said, reaching into his pocket and handing me a handkerchief.

I wiped my hand and neck clean. So I had become Dominic’s pal. We had fought the common enemy and come through as blood brothers.

“He’s bawling like a goddamn baby,” said Jasper. “What’s this scumbag’s name, Sport?”

“Wayman,” I said. And then on the spur of the moment, like some all-powerful don, I added, “Don’t kill him.”

“What are you, an idiot? I wouldn’t have gone to the trouble of hurting him if I was going to kill him,” said Jasper over Wayman’s moans. “Now – Wayman,” he shouted, loud and slow as if he were talking to a Frenchman. “I – don’t – want – you – should – bother – Victor – no – more – do – you – understand?”

Wayman let out a little shriek of assent.

“I – don’t – want – I – should – hear – that – he – is – troubled – or – that – he – is – dead – because – then – I – will – be – angry – do – you – understand?”

Another shriek of assent.

“That’s – good – Wayman,” said Jasper, patting his cheek. “You’re – in – no – condition – to – drive. – We’re – going – to – let – your – friend – drive – you – home.”

Giovanni shrugged and reached into the dumpster, pulling out the dazed and bleeding drummer by his collar and his crotch. The drummer collapsed to the ground and tried to half crawl away. Giovanni kicked him in the ribs so hard the drummer shook uncontrollably for a moment before letting out a breathless cry. Then Giovanni lifted him to his feet by his neck and kicked him in the rear, sending him lurching for the car. He fell on its hood like a drunken beggar at an intersection offering to clean the windshield. Dominic opened the front door for him. He took hold of the drummer, pulled him around the front of the car, and shoved him inside. Jasper lifted Wayman by his belt. Wayman, bent and bowed, cradling both arms into his chest, hunched his way over to the car. I opened the passenger door. Without looking at me, he dropped onto the seat.

“Stay the fuck out of South Philly,” said Dominic. When there was no movement from the battered occupants, he shouted, “Get out of here. Now.”

The car didn’t speed away from the scene, it sort of staggered. First it swerved to the right, then stopped suddenly, then drifted to the left, sideswiping a maroon meat van parked in front of a store. There was the loud crinkle of metal bending and plastic cracking. The car dipped back to the right before it shot forward and stopped and moved slowly forward again.

“Where did they come from?” asked Beth as she stood beside me, watching the silver BMW painfully make its way down 7th Street. “And how are they your friends?”

I shrugged. “Poker buddies. Remember the phone call I made just before we left the hotel?”

“Yes.”

“That’s who I called.”

Just then a great white Cadillac, rear windows tinted so dark it was impossible to see inside, slid to a stop right in front of us. Lenny was driving. He waved at me. With a hum, the rear window opened and the ugly pitted face of Enrico Raffaello appeared.

“Everything is all right, I see,” he said.

“Thank you very much, Mr. Raffaello,” I said. “He would have killed me if you hadn’t stepped in.”

“You’re welcome, Victor. Protection is what we do, but generally we don’t do it for free.”

“I’m very grateful.”

“Well, grateful is something, yes, but it doesn’t pay for the ricotta. Consider this a favor, Victor. We take pride in doing favors for the citizens of this city. We expect, of course, that the favor will be reciprocated when the time comes.”

“I understand, sir.”

“Now about that project you were to do for me. I hope you haven’t disappointed.”

I gestured at the silver BMW slowly making its way down 7th. “If you follow that car it will take you right to the money, Mr. Raffaello. A man named Norvel Goodwin ended up with it.”

“Now that’s almost too ironic, Jimmy’s money ending up with a drug kingpin. There must be quite a story in this. You will tell it to me sometime, Victor, but not now. Now I think we’ll follow that car. Come here, son, I have something for you.”

Sheepishly I stepped forward. Raffaello lifted a white bag out of the window. I took it from him and stepped back.

“We’ll be in touch, Victor, you can be sure.”

He nodded his head and the window rose, concealing his face. Dominic, Jasper, and Giovanni slipped into the car and slowly, carefully, it drove off.

Beth stepped to my side. She was staring at the car. “Was that who I think it was?” she managed to say.

“Yes,” I said. I opened the bag and looked inside. “What kind of custard do you like in your cannoli, Beth, chocolate or vanilla?”

“Vanilla,” she said.

I reached into the bag and took out the vanilla cannoli and gave it to her and then reached in and gave her the chocolate one too. “Hold this for me a moment, will you?”

With the bag in hand, I walked a bit down 7th, scanning the street, searching. Finally I found it. It had slid up against the curb and was resting there, its blade pointing due north like a compass. I took one of the paper napkins graciously supplied by my new liege Enrico Raffaello and, with the napkin between my fingers, took hold of the blade, lifting it carefully before dropping it into the bag. I figured Slocum would be delighted to get hold of the knife that had killed Chuckie Lamb, complete with a clean set of prints. I just wanted to be sure that the prints on the knife weren’t mine.

55

THE MOMENT WHEN a lawyer stands in court and calls the next witness is a moment fraught with expectation. As the witness walks the long distance down the aisle, the jury, the judge, the opponents, the gawkers, the entire community of that courtroom wonder what evidence will be disclosed, what devastating story will be told, in what way will this witness’s testimony be decisive. It is a glorious moment for the trial lawyer, full of drama, full of mystery. No matter how many trials, no matter how many witnesses, no matter how pedestrian the matter at issue, standing in the courtroom and calling the next witness never becomes routine. And the key to that moment is logistics. In every courtroom across this country there is a lawyer with neck craned, examining the benches and the door in the back, wondering if the next witness is waiting to respond to the call. It is not enough to prepare the questions, to practice the testimony, to hone the arguments to razor sharpness. Logistics are all. Standing in the courtroom, calling the next witness and having nothing happen, you might just as well be standing there naked.

“Do you have your witness yet, Mr. Carl?” asked Judge Gimbel, and none too kindly. The judge had a docket of 478 cases, and waiting for a witness to magically appear was doing nothing to reduce that number.

“If I can just have another minute, Your Honor,” I said.

“Sixty seconds,” said Judge Gimbel. I was hoping he would leave the bench, tell his clerk to get him when I was ready, take me off the hook, but the judge had brought his paperwork with him and as he sat up on high and scrawled in big letters across some important legal document I sweated like a thief. Like a naked thief.

From the defense table I dashed up the courtroom aisle, suffering the smirks of Jimmy and Prescott and Prescott’s coterie, and burst into the cool, cruelly empty hallway. I looked left and then right and then left again. Nothing. The plan had been that I would flee the Society Hill Sheraton with Beth, in brown wig and overcoat, drawing the chase while Morris and Veronica, in blonde wig and jacket, simply strolled out the front door past Sheldon, acting as lookout, and stay on their way straight to the courthouse. Then Morris would bring her here, to the courtroom, to await my call. It was the awaiting my call part that was causing the problem. Beth was outside the courthouse, waiting for their arrival at the main entrance on Market Street. I was rushing crazily about inside, hoping they would magically appear.

Beside the courtroom doors there was a bank of pay phones and quickly I called Morris’s office.

“Kapustin and Son, Investigations,” said Morris.

“Morris, you bastard, where are you?”

“There is no one here to take your call, but we are checking in with this machine like crazy. Just leave a message and we’ll be with you so quick your head will do a somersault, that quick.”

I cursed into the phone in loud, precise language before the machine beeped me shut.

I called my office, to see if Morris had left me a message, but Rita only sneered. “Any calls? My, here’s a shocker, Mr. Carl. No calls this morning. Maybe I’ll ring up the Inquirer about this breaking story. No calls for Mr. Carl.”

I hung up on her and spun out of the phone alcove in frustration, whirling into the frail figure of Herm Finklebaum, the toy king of 44th Street, sending him sprawling backwards on the cold white floor of the courthouse. I leaned over him. He wore his regular plaid shirt, ragged houndstooth jacket, lime-green slacks. He lay there, unconscious, the blood throbbing only faintly beneath the skin stretching over the hole in his head.

“Jesus, Herm. I’m sorry. Are you all right? Herm? Herm?”

He lay there quite still. He was a small, frail man. The skin clung tightly to his cadaverous skull. My already fraying nerves writhed into a panic.

“Herm? Oh, God, Herm? Are you all right, Herm? Herm? Jesus, Herm. Wake up.”

One eye popped opened.

“Next time, buddy boy, you watch where you’re going or it will end in a lawsuit.”

I helped him up. He turned his neck carefully from side to side.

“It feels a little stiff,” he said.

“Do you need a doctor?”

“Not really, it’s been stiff since ’seventy-two.” His laugh was an annoying, rhythmic wheeze, like an asthma attack.

“Look, I’m sorry, Herm, but I have to go. I have to find someone.”

I was already past him, hustling off in my vain search for Morris when he said, “You maybe looking for that pretty little Miss Ashland?”

I slid to a stop on the waxed floors and spun around. “You know where she is?”

“Maybe I do and maybe I don’t.”

“Oh, come on, Herm.”

“Okay, I do. Morris has her down on the sixth floor. He told me to find you to ask when you wanted her.”

“Now,” I said. “I want her right now.”

“Morris thought it better to keep her hidden until she was really needed.”

“I need her right this instant.”

“It’s going to be interesting?”

“It’s going to be dynamite.”

“All right, buddy boy. One dishy little number coming up. Save me a seat.”

Logistics are all until they’re solved, then they disappear like a dream upon waking. I had my questions ready, I had prepared the testimony, I had my arguments honed, and now, best of all, I had my witness. I took a moment to slow myself down. I took three deep breaths and gave myself a slight oxygen buzz. When it wore off I straightened my jacket, shot my cuffs, and walked with as much confidence as I could muster into the courtroom.

All gazes were upon me as I strode down the aisle. The judge asked me if I was now ready to proceed and I said I was. The jury sat straighter in their seats. The court reporter wriggled his fingers in preparation. Prescott sat with pen poised over his pad. Much had been paid for this moment and I meant to enjoy it. I scanned the jury, I looked at Jimmy Moore, the wild expectation grew. Before the judge could break the mood with one of his admonitions to get moving, I spoke in a loud and clear voice,

“On behalf of Chester Concannon, I call to the stand Veronica Ashland.”

Right on cue she opened the courtroom door, peered in, and then pensively, awkwardly, with just the right amount of hesitation and awe, she walked down the aisle, her head held nervously forward. She was wearing a white blouse, a black pleated skirt, she looked more like a Catholic schoolgirl than a councilman’s mistress. Without glancing at either Chester or Jimmy she took the stand. With hand raised and voice low she said, “I do,” to the clerk’s swearing-in and then sat demurely in the witness chair, hands on her lap, waiting for me to draw out her story.

56

“DID YOU WANT TO come to testify today, Ms. Ashland?” I asked.

“No,” she said.

“Then why are you here?”

“Because you subpoenaed me,” she said.

From the start, I wanted to let the jury know where this witness stood. Here was not Chester Concannon’s mother testifying to save her son, here was a potentially hostile witness, sitting up there only because she had a truth that we were insisting she tell. I had her identify the subpoena that I had served upon her and put it into evidence. I would wave it at the jury in my closing as I argued for her credibility.

“Now, Miss Ashland, do you know Councilman Moore?”

She glanced at him warily. “Yes,” she said.

“How do you know him?”

“We’re friends,” she said.

“How did you meet him?”

She let out a deep breath and said nothing.

“How did you meet Councilman Moore, Miss Ashland?”

“He had come with a group to raid a crack house on Sixty-first Street.”

She had given the wrong address. “Was that Sixty-first Street or Fifty-first Street?”

She sighed. “You’re right, Fifty-first Street. I was inside when he came.”

“Why were you inside?”

“I was using at the time.”

“Using what?”

“Cocaine.”

“Crack cocaine?”

“Yes.”

“And the councilman found you inside?”

“Yes. And he took me to a drug rehabilitation center and got me off of drugs.”

“Do you know the councilman’s attitude toward drugs?”

“He hates them with a passion. He hates the dealers, the profiteers. He hates those who killed his daughter.”

“They incense him?”

“Yes.”

“Make him angry?”

“Yes.”

“Violently angry?”

Prescott stood up quickly. “Objection, calls for speculation.”

“Answer if you can,” said the judge.

“Yes,” she said. “Violently angry.”

“Have you seen the violence?”

“Yes. At the raid he was swinging a chair wildly, knocking down everything he could find. He was almost crazy.”

“Did you see him hit anyone with the chair?”

“Yes.”

“Who?”

“I saw him hit Norvel Goodwin.”

“And who is Norvel Goodwin?”

Her lips quivered in hesitation and her eyes pleaded at me not to force her to say anything against Goodwin, but I looked down at my papers, waiting for her answer.

“The man who was selling in that house.”

“Were you involved with Norvel Goodwin at the time?”

“Romantically, you mean?”

“Yes,” I said.

“I was on drugs. Romance and drugs do not go hand in hand, Mr. Carl.”

“Were you sexually involved with Norvel Goodwin?”

“Yes.”

“How did you feel when you saw the councilman swing the chair and hit Mr. Goodwin?”

“I was scared. But he didn’t hurt me, he helped me.”

“And after he helped you get off drugs, did your relationship change?”

“Yes.”

“How did it change, Miss Ashland?”

She looked at me hard and then glanced at Jimmy and then cast her gaze down to her hands twisting together on her lap. “We became lovers,” she said.

“You began to have an affair, is that right?”

“That’s what I said, yes.”

“And did the affair continue throughout this trial?”

“No, not the whole time. Jimmy told me it was over the day you mentioned my name in court.”

“How did he tell you this?”

“Over the phone.”

“Isn’t he putting you up in a hotel room now?”

“I told him I was afraid to stay at home. He found me a room.”

“Did he visit you there?”

“No,” she said. “You’re not listening. It’s over.”

“How do you feel about that?”

“Angry,” she said.

“At him?”

“No,” she said. “At you.”

And so my foundation was laid. I had brought out her relationship with Jimmy, her drug use, Jimmy’s propensity to violence when faced with drugs and their dealers, and the end of their affair, leaving her bitter toward me, not Jimmy, so she would have no reason to lie about what Jimmy had done. My difficulty, of course, was that now I had a drug user for a witness. What I had to do, in effect, was to try her in front of the jury for being a drug addict, a slut, a homewrecker, try her and acquit her before Prescott was able to get his hands on her in cross-examination. I had to bring out everything that might be used against her, bring it out as carefully as if it were an armed pipe bomb, and then diffuse it before the jury so that when Prescott tried to impugn her on cross with it the jury would think they were being told an old story and wonder why Prescott was going over it still again.

So what I did was gently lead her through her entire life story, from Iowa to London to her trip around the world with Saffron Hyde. I had her linger as she talked about the bus accident, about how Saffron needed the drugs for his pain, and how she too became addicted. And then, in detail, I had her tell the jury about his swim in the Ganges and his death in Varanasi and the burning of his body. Both Eggert and Prescott objected to the story but the judge gave me the latitude I requested, agreeing with me that I was entitled to give evidence to mitigate any loss of credibility of the witness due to her drug use. So back we went to New York and the University of Pennsylvania and that crack house on 51st Street where Jimmy Moore found her, and the drug rehabilitation center and the apartment in Olde City that the councilman leased for her at a bargain rate in exchange for a street. It was a good story, well told, with tears and hesitations and true emotion and by the end of it there was no doubt that the jury felt for her, shared her tears. The jury had gone through her life story and come out at the other end on her side. I was ready now to get to the meat of her testimony, except for one more disclosure.

“During the time of your relationship with Jimmy Moore, did you have affairs with other men?”

“Yes.”

“Why, Miss Ashland?” It was a question not strictly relevant, but I couldn’t help myself from asking it.

“I don’t know. I was lonely, I guess. Bored. Jimmy had a wife. I had nothing but a part-time him.”

“Did you have an affair with Zack Bissonette?”

“Yes,” she said and that brought a little “Aaah” from one of the jurors who had finally begun to see what she was doing in this trial in the first place.

I hesitated for a moment, looked down at my papers. I shuffled one over the other and back again as I screwed up my courage to ask the next question. “And did you also have an affair with me?” The question itself was enough to silence any murmurs in the courtroom.

“Yes,” she said. “Unfortunately.”

I could have stopped there, I guess. I had tossed out the worst of it with that simple question and her simple answer. I could have left it to Eggert and Prescott to pick over the carcass of our dead relationship. Chester Concannon was glaring at me with a strange look of doubt that I had never seen from him before, a doubt that would only grow deeper the further I delved into what had happened between Veronica and me, and there was really no reason to delve any further. But when the judge called me to the bench and reamed me out for a good five minutes over getting involved with a witness, forcing me to explain to him that I didn’t know she was a witness when I started my involvement with her, I thought I should explain that very thing to the jury, since they too may have been suffering from a misapprehension. So instead of stopping like I could have, I continued on.

“How did you meet me, Miss Ashland?”

She gaped at me, and then said, “At a restaurant. You tried to pick me up with some of Jimmy’s champagne.”

“For how long did we see each other?”

“For as long as it was convenient.”

She was staring hard at me and I stared back at her and for a moment it was only her and me in the courtroom and I had the power to ask her anything I wanted. I was tempted to ask her about her feelings for me, did they ever exist, did I ever satisfy her, was our sex as incredible for her as it was for me, did she ever love me, did she ever dream, like I did, that it could go on forever. And could she forgive me for what I was putting her through now and, if so, was there any possibility that after this was all over, after the trial was finished, after she had cleaned herself up and our lives had resumed their unbearable stasis, after everything, could she ever consider coming back to me? That was what I wanted to ask her, all that and more. But what I asked instead was, “When did you tell me you had been sleeping with Zack Bissonette?”

“When you asked.”

“That was after we had become involved, is that right?”

“Yes.”

“And did we continue our affair after I learned about your relationship with Bissonette?”

“Well, you kissed me after that,” she said. “When you gave me the subpoena.” That got a chuckle from the crowd.

“But now our relationship is over, is that right?”

“It was over before it started,” she said.

“And we’re not seeing each other anymore?”

“No,” she said and then she let out a sly smile. “Not even if you begged.”

I stepped back and winced. My reaction was noticed, there was a titter from the jury, a few slight laughs from the audience behind me. And somehow, with the laugher it all seemed all right now. It was the banter that did it, the clichéd angry girlfriend bit that did it. It was as if my relationship with Veronica now fell neatly into that whole boy-girl thing, absolving me of anything dark and sinister. I glanced over to the jury and there were some admiring glances, that someone like me could have played around with someone like her. I had been raised a few notches in their esteem. It was incredible, I thought, that a woman with whom I was obsessed could mash a grapefruit in my face in the middle of a crowded courtroom and it only served to build up my standing. Sure, let it happen just like that. I had a job to do, a story to tell, and now it was time to tell it.

“All right, Miss Ashland,” I said. “You have a checking account, is that right?”

“Yes.”

“Is there another name on that account?”

“Chet’s name is also on the account.”

“Why?”

“I was getting some money from Jimmy every now and then through Chet. Putting Chet’s name on it made it easier for him to give me the money.”

“Did there come a time when certain large amounts were deposited in that account?”

“Yes,” she said. “Chet asked me to put in certain amounts of cash.”

“Chet asked?” She had made another mistake. “You mean the councilman.”

“No, Chet. I assumed he was asking on behalf of Jimmy. Everything before with that account had always been on behalf of Jimmy.” So that’s what she had meant when she said Jimmy had asked her to deposit the money. But why had Concannon gone along with it? I looked at Chester. He had the same look of doubt his face had held before.

“How much was deposited?” I continued.

“I don’t know the total, but each deposit was always just under ten thousand dollars.”

“How many deposits?”

“Ten or fifteen.”

“And what happened to the money?”

“I don’t know firsthand,” she said.

“Tell us what you know,” I said.

“Objection, hearsay,” said Prescott.

“Sustained,” said the judge.

“Well, what had you heard?” I asked.

“Objection,” said Prescott.

“Sustained,” said Judge Gimbel. “Move on, Mr. Carl.”

That line wasn’t working. She didn’t know enough to get out what I had wanted to get out about Norvel Goodwin and the money. Her knowledge was secondhand, her answers too indistinct. I looked over at the jury box. I saw a yawn. The sight of it cut me. I was losing them. I needed something big, now.

“All right, Miss Ashland, let’s move on to Zack Bissonette.” There was a pause, which sucked back the jury’s attention. “Where did you meet him?”

“At his club. Jimmy, Chet, Chuckie, and I used to go there. That’s how we met.”

“How did you start dating?”

“Dating?” She tossed me a little smirk, just to let everyone know she was no cheerleader in a ponytail. “He asked me out one night at the club.”

“While you were there with Jimmy?”

“Yes. Whatever his shortcomings, lack of gall was not one of them.”

“And what did you say?”

“I gave him my phone number.”

“You wrote it down for him?”

“I just told it to him. I figured if he was interested enough he would remember.”

“And he remembered?”

“Yes. He called me the next day.”

“And you went out together.”

“Yes.”

“Why, Miss Ashland? Why did you go out with Mr. Bissonette?”

“He was handsome, he had played baseball, poorly maybe, but he had played, he dressed in black, I don’t know, I guess I couldn’t think of a reason not to.”

“Now when you started going out with Mr. Bissonette, were you using drugs?”

“No. Absolutely not.”

“How long had you been drug-free?”

“Over two years.”

“Did you see Mr. Bissonette many times?”

“A few.”

“Did you sleep with him?”

“Yes, I slept with him.”

“Did there come a time when you stopped seeing him?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“I grew bored. I grow bored easily, Mr. Carl, as you know. He was boring, that’s all.”

“So you told him it was over.”

“Yes.”

“How did Mr. Bissonette take it?”

“Not very well. He wanted to keep seeing me. He insisted we keep going out.”

“What happened?”

“I said no, that it was over.”

“Did there come a time when you started seeing him again?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“Well, he was begging, he was a pest. One night when I was bored, with nothing to do, I called and told him he could come over.”

“Did he bring anything with him?”

“Yes.”

“What?”

“He brought me cocaine.”

I stepped back from the podium for a moment to let the last answer sink in. The points were being laid out and I wanted the connections to be drawn by the jurors before being made explicit by Veronica. I wanted them to expect to hear what Veronica would say, that Jimmy, who was violently opposed to drugs, had reacted violently once he found out that Bissonette had been first sleeping with and then supplying drugs to his mistress, a woman who had filled the gap in his life left from the drug death of his daughter. I wanted to set it up so that when Veronica gave voice to the obvious suspicions her response would be that much more believable. I turned around to look at the rest of the courtroom. There was Morris nodding at me, sitting next to Herm and Beth. Slocum was also in the audience, taking notes as he prepared for the murder trial. Behind Jimmy, where his wife usually sat, was an empty place in the benches. The courtroom artists were busily sketching the scene. Everything was perfectly in place. When whatever murmurs that had arisen from the cocaine response faded, I stepped back to the podium to continue.

“Did you take the cocaine that Mr. Bissonette offered?” I asked.

“Yes.”

“Why, Miss Ashland, if you had been drug-free for over two years?”

“Because I missed it, and I was lonely, and I was disgusted that I had allowed a stiff like Zack back into my bedroom. Because I am not as strong a woman as I would like, Mr. Carl.”

“Did you become addicted again?”

“Yes.”

“Did you only get cocaine from Mr. Bissonette?”

“No.”

“Where else?”

“Anywhere I could.”

“Did you have another primary source?”

“Yes.”

“Who, Ms. Ashland?”

“Norvel Goodwin,” she said.

“The same man who had been selling out of that crack house on Fifty-first Street, the same man who Jimmy Moore had beaten with a chair?”

“Yes.”

“Now, did there come a time that someone else found out about your renewed drug use?”

“Yes.”

“And who was that?”

“Chet Concannon found out,” she said.

She had made still another mistake that I had to correct. “You mean the councilman, don’t you?”

“No,” she said. “It was Chet who found out.”

“And then Chester told the councilman?”

“No,” she said. “Chet came right to me.”

I gave her another chance. “So when did the councilman come over?”

“He never did. Chet had the limousine that night, he often used it, and he came over to my apartment after he found out.”

“And you spoke?”

“Yes.”

“And then he told the councilman?”

“No, that’s not what happened. When he came over he was very upset, agitated. He demanded to know how I had started up again with drugs and when I told him that it was Bissonette he flew into a rage.”

“It was the councilman in the rage, wasn’t it?”

“No,” she said, shaking her head. “No. You’re not listening. It was Chet. He was often my beard on evenings when Jimmy wanted to bring his wife to a reception and then see me afterwards, and he began to fall in love with me. We had sex once, one lonely evening, and it seemed to be important to him. I used to tease him about it, but it was real, I could see that. So when he found out about Bissonette he was furious, as angry as if I had been cheating on him. And the drugs, that made him even angrier. I pleaded with him not to tell the councilman, because I knew how angry he would get, how violent. He promised me he wouldn’t, that he would take care of it himself. He said he would take care of it, that he had been stiffed out of another quarter of a million, that they had dropped him like a sucker and that by dealing with Bissonette he could take care of two birds with one bullet. That’s what he said. I begged him not to do anything stupid but he told me not to worry about it, that he would take care of everything. And then he left. That’s the last I saw of him that night. The next day I heard that Zack had been beaten into a coma. I was terrified.”

I stared at her, shocked into silence, shocked enough to let her talk on and on, and talk on and on she did. While her other answers were short, two or three sentences at the most, this response seemed to last forever, and I felt helpless to stop her. I was so stunned I didn’t even try. And when she had finished she sat on the stand looking straight at me, without even a breath of malice on her face.

In a weak voice I asked the judge for a moment, which he granted, and I walked unsteadily to Chester at the defense table. The doubt in his face had been replaced with anger. I leaned over him and whispered.

“Is any of this true?” I asked.

“No,” he hissed.

“You fucked her, didn’t you?”

“You did too,” said Chester viciously. “So what? The rest of that is crap. What are you doing to me? What are you letting them do to me? You’ve sold me out.”

Still leaning over Concannon, I glanced at Prescott, who was watching Chester and me with amusement on his thin lips. He looked at me and then through those thin fucking lips there arose the hint of a smile, the merest hint, but there it was. Where before I had seen his smile and read it as “Welcome to the club,” this time I knew exactly what it meant, and what all the smiles before it had meant too. He smiled that slight smile at me and what that smile was saying, was shouting, was shrieking for the whole court to hear was, “Got you, you little small-time Jew bastard.”

The feeling I had in that instant was like falling down a pit, falling without a parachute, without hope, fall falling. My stomach collapsed, my knees buckled, my eyes teared wildly, and spots appeared before me as my consciousness dipped. All I wanted to do at that moment was to heave and if I had anything in my stomach, if I had eaten Raffaello’s damned cannoli, drunk a cup of coffee, anything, I’m sure I would have, right there in the middle of the courtroom, right there on the defense table, right there in front of the judge, the jury, right there in front of my client, Chester Concannon, my client, who had put his freedom in my hands and who now, I was certain, was going straight and irrevocably to jail.