by Scott Turow
“Rollo the K, how’s tricks?” Robbie slipped into the usual open space beside Kosic. Rollo nodded a bit and worked on his cigarette. Up above, the pianist began a rendition of “Yesterday.” Dressed entirely in black, the musician crooned along lethargically, bearing up through one more night of indignity in which any attention he received came only when the patrons reached an awkward juncture in their come-ons. Evon knew the music was going to be a problem on the recording, but there was nothing to do about it now. Kosic had yet to say a word, anyway.
When Robbie introduced her, Rollo cranked his face over his shoulder and looked her up and down in far too frank a manner. He was out of place in here, where the air throbbed with pretense and fashion. He wore a very old tweed sportcoat and a washed-out plaid shirt. His black hair, the soggy remnants of an old d.a., spilled over his collar. His face looked dried out by drink.
Robbie motioned to the piano bar up above and told Kosic a quick joke: A guy comes into a joint, opens his briefcase, and on the bar puts down a miniature Steinway and a little man one foot tall. The little man plays for an hour and the guy collects a number of tips. When the barkeep expresses his admiration, the man with the briefcase grimaces. ‘Whoever heard of a genie with a hearing problem? You really think I asked for a twelve-inch pee-nist?’
Rollo took it the way he might have tried to shake off a punch, twitching out the sour leavings of a smile. He crushed his cigarette and shook his head. He drank old-fashioneds, and kept his right hand on his glass most of the time, his index finger curled inward. Robbie had explained that the nail had a sinister look, a little like the shell of a rotting walnut. It had been crushed in the service while Rollo was hauling an artillery round. It grew back black and rimpled, and was ordinarily hidden. Feaver said that was the only way to tell when Rollo was angry, since he otherwise maintained a morbid and haunting lack of affect. But when he extended that index finger at you, with that ugly token at the end, it was not a good sign.
At the moment, Kosic took the stem of his cherry between his thumb and third finger. He gave it a twirl, then knocked the glass back, draining it and taking one of the ice cubes in his mouth. He chewed on it as Robbie and Evon stood beside him in silence. When Lutese came their way, Robbie put a fifty on the bar and surrendered his stool to Evon, asking Lutese to refill Rollo and to tell Evon her fortune. She and Robbie, even Kosic, watched while Lutese shuffled and smoothly dealt out the tarot cards, despite the glistening obstruction of her yellow nails, each curved like a parrot’s bill.
“Home?” she heard Kosic ask Robbie very softly, apparently thinking Evon was distracted. His voice was high, a virtual countertenor. She wondered if its feminine quality accounted for his reluctance to speak.
“Not good,” Robbie answered.
Kosic grunted. It was not clear if that was a response to Lorraine’s condition or to the fact that Lutese had just put down his drink.
“Listen,” Robbie said to Kosic, “I’m happy to bump into you, I got a little something. I’ve been trying to figure out who to talk to. Maybe you can give me a pointer. You don’t mind listening, right? It’s a barroom. Everybody’s gotta tell you their problems.” Robbie laughed. When Evon’s eyes drifted sideways, she saw Kosic toss another ice cube into his mouth.
“Anyway, I got some problems in a case I filed a couple weeks back.” Robbie named it.
“Who’d you draw?” Kosic asked neutrally. There was no way to tell if he truly didn’t recall.
“Malatesta.”
“Good judge,” said Kosic, then added, “Knows the law.”
Lutese continued dealing on the granite bar top, talking to the figures on the cards as if they could hear her.
“Right,” Evon heard Robbie say in her earpiece. “Normally, you know, I’m really happy to get him. But I got a very big problem. Case is a Structural Work Act. Client’s painting an atrium and a scaffolding collapses. Serious, serious back injuries. Herniations, L-4 and -5. So I call to tell him we filed, they always want to know, and he says, ‘I’m a little numb, I just saw my internist and I’ve got stage four cancer of the lung.’ Cancer! Now I got a hellacious problem. Case is worth zip if the insurer finds out he’s a goner, right? No loss of future earnings.”
With considerable circumspection, Robbie detailed his troubles in having the case before Malatesta. For Robbie to have any hope of recovering much, the judge would have to quickly suspend the discovery process while Robbie attempted to settle. But Malatesta never agreed to stay discovery, a practice only judge Skolnick ordinarily allowed. Walter’s warning made it certain that Malatesta would not consider a deviation in this case.
“So I got a bellyful on this one,” Robbie told Kosic.
Robbie, as usual, had laid down the pitch just as Sennett and McManis had scripted it. He wasn’t asking for relief so much as issuing a warning. Everybody would end up a loser if the case remained before Malatesta. As he spoke, Robbie concentrated on the TV over the bar where mud bikes were spinning through glop. Evon was pretending to watch the piano. Looking back, she saw Kosic’s small eyes aimed at Feaver. A pure, deadly light beamed from them. He was flicking nervously at the notch over his lip, touching it again and again with his blackened fingernail. He said absolutely nothing.
Taking the cue, Robbie shifted at once to talk of the Indiana basketball team which had clobbered the Hands, the U.’s team, last week. Kosic showed no interest. He got off his stool and threw back the diluted remains of his drink. Lutese, at that moment, laid out the last of the cards, a red queen, and stared down at it. When her wide brown eyes rose to Evon, they held a look of alarm.
“The two-faced queen lives a lie,” she said.
It was not clear Kosic had heard that as he pushed out, with no word of goodbye.
THE RECORDING WAS TERRIBLE. At the critical moments, Robbie, just as Klecker had instructed, had rounded his shoulders and hunched forward to funnel sound toward the mike, which tonight had been placed under his tie. But the piano and the singing intruded into every sentence; it was as if Robbie was speaking between measures in a karaoke bar. A woman to whom Evon had paid no attention could be heard distinctly now, whining along. ‘Now I long for yes-ter-day, ay, ay, ay.’ The recording offered no proof Kosic had even heard Robbie.
But he had. Evon had been palpably frightened by the wave of primal menace he transmitted. As had Robbie. Sennett and I had hurried to McManis’s conference room to hear the results and Feaver now directed his attention to Stan.
“They’re gonna make me dead,” he told him, “if I keep pushing like this. I said way too much.”
Sennett frowned.
“Listen, Stan,” said Robbie, “you may think I’m just afraid of the big bad wolf, but Brendan’s the only guy I know who’s an actual killer. I mean, killed with his bare hands in Korea. And would do it again today, if he thought he had to. He’s ordered hits. I mean it. That’s why he’s stayed hooked up. It’s not just for money. He wants to be able to push a button on somebody if he has to.”
Even I had trouble believing that. Most talk of violence, even in mob cases, was gas, and I had a hard time imagining a Presiding Judge orchestrating a murder. Robbie looked around the table, where he was encountering similarly skeptical expressions from Alf and Jim and Joe Amari. As McManis had told him long ago, c.i.’s were always scared by what they were doing.
“Here, I’ll tell you a story,” Robbie said, looking about to each of us. “I’ve told you before that Brendan’s had the same thing on the side now for more than twenty years with Constanza in his office. Constanza is like a jewel, this tiny, exquisite thing, five feet tall, perfectly shaped, and this noble Mexican face, Irish features and Indian cheekbones. Fifty plus now and still this very quiet, dignified beauty. Married lady—which is another story—with two kids, a boy, never meant for much good, and a daughter, completely the opposite.
“And Brendan, you know, he’s been good to these kids, like he’s been to me, frankly, always looking out and concerned. A
nyway, the daughter goes off to the U., with a full boat ride, and does the college-age breaking-away stuff, takes up with a boyfriend. Black kid. And not a bad kid, really. Full of himself, but hell, he’s nineteen years old. Constanza was having none of it. Not just cause he’s black. I think if he was black and Catholic, she maybe could handle it. But that’s a two-for with her. And the daughter, of course, she kicked and moaned originally, but eventually, you know, she loves her mom, life goes on, she adioses the black guy and meets a nice boy, Puerto Rican, which is next worst to Mom, but this one’s been in the seminary, so he otherwise fills the bill. Only this black kid, Artis, he won’t take no for an answer. He calls. He follows the daughter around. He won’t back off. And his life is going to hell in the process. He drops out of school. He gets strung out on something. He’s more and more desperate, and finally one night, he’s dusted his brains out, he jumps the daughter and the P.R. boyfriend, he pistol-whips the Rican, holds the girl at gunpoint, threatens to rape her, and finally, for whatever kind of jolly this is, makes her watch while he pulls his own pud.
“Well, Constanza goes straight to Brendan. Now, Brendan, when it comes to power, Brendan gets every channel. So he’s never let go of his alliances on the Force. If he gives the call, he can have thirty uniformed coppers looking for this kid. He can make sure Artis doesn’t get bail, that he gets the treatment at the jail till his anal sphincter has the same consistency as Cream of Wheat. But that’s not good enough. Because Brendan, I guess, personally told this kid on a couple occasions, Cut it out or else. So now it’s Or Else. He gets on the phone. He calls Toots Nuccio, who was always his connect. And Brendan’s Brendan, he doesn’t ask for anything out loud. He just shoots the breeze with Toots, he tells Toots this story in passing, about this horrible thing that happened to his secretary, Constanza, and her family. ‘Can you believe this gorilla son of a bitch, what zoo’d they let him out of? It’s a shame to call yourself a human being with the likes of that walking around on the same planet. I can’t stand to breathe the same air.’ That’s all. T, h, e end for Artis. Ciao, au revoir, sayonara, bye-bye. When they found him, he had battery acid dumped on his genitals sometime before they finished him off. And it goes on the police blotter as a gang hit. ‘Pity what they do to each other.’
“And here’s why Brendan’s a genius: because he made sure everybody close to him knew the story. His fingerprints aren’t anywhere on the hit, of course. But he tells the tale about poor Artis and smiles. ‘Makes you think there’s a God in heaven.’ But he was trying to make a different kind of believer.
“So Uncle Brendan, he ever finds out I set him up, it’ll be the same for me, if he gets the chance. He’ll have them gut me like a fish and come by to watch my heart beat its last on the pier.”
As it turned out, no more than a week later, Judge Gillian Sullivan, still under relentless press criticism for her insobriety, took a ninety-day administrative leave from the bench. Officially, she was hospitalized for ‘stress.’ In the interval, much of her docket was reassigned. The two contrived cases Robbie’d had languishing on her call were both transferred, one to Judge Crowthers, one to Judge Barnett Skolnick. In the course of that reshuffling, the suit of the painter who’d developed cancer was also sent to Judge Skolnick from Judge Malatesta. The only explanation on the order was ‘Reassigned for the convenience of the court.’ Kosic, whatever his suspicions, had done just as Robbie had asked. But we did not know that, that night. What we knew was only what Robbie with his skills at impressing himself meant to convey.
These were dangerous men. Anyone who crossed them was in peril.
AFTERWARDS, IN THE MERCEDES, the shadows of fright and disappointment kept them silent for quite some time as Robbie maneuvered through the dwindling traffic in the dark streets. At a stoplight, they were caught under the flickerings of a mercury lamp going bad. It reminded Evon of a question.
“‘Glows in the dark’?”
“Implants,” he answered, smiling wearily.
She laughed, but there was no admiration in it. She made a remark about men.
“Hey,” he said, “you think the women in there are better? They’re looking for rich guys and a free ride.”
“It’s so angry. That kind of talk.”
“They’re all angry. Most of them. Because they’re lonely and setting themselves up to feel worse by the time the evening is through. And they know it. Every one of them. The guys. The gals. They’re lonely and they’re burnouts. They know they’re taking what they can get. If I was gonna rename that place, I’d call it Sadder But Wiser.”
“So why did you like to go?”
“You telling me you’ve never hung out in joints like that?”
Not like that. Not that she hadn’t had her nights, her sorties to secret places. After the Olympics, after her body stopped being such a holy shrine, she’d go out to get juiced so she could see what she’d been missing. She’d been part of the good-time group getting smashed on Friday nights in agent hangs across the nation. And there were evenings of abandoned, obliviated drinking aimed really at nothing more than getting ready to have sex. But none of it lasted. For her, these evenings were at best mistakes, at worst harshly struck notes of personal shame. And she remembered none of it with Robbie’s wistfulness. Far from sad, he’d ignited the minute they were through the door. When she repeated that observation, he seesawed his head, something short of a denial.
“Well, I was always chasing the Myth. Like everybody else in there. You know? The myth of love. Right? Love will make me different. Love will make me better. Love will make me dig myself.”
“But it doesn’t work,” she said. It was the first thing she’d said for herself. Naturally, he didn’t notice she wasn’t speaking about him.
“At the time? Romancing, getting there? It worked. In the sack? It worked. A lot. Because I was really there. And she was really there. The whole experience is beyond bullshit, right? It’s beyond everything else in my life I’ve fucked up. I don’t have a past or a law practice or a sick wife at home. And neither does she. I can be happy. And so can she. We can make each other happy. I can be something great and good to her. And she can be that way to me. And for an hour or a night, for a while, man, we can love each other for it.
“You know, sometimes, I’d just sort of wake to it, like, Here I am, sharing this experience, intimacy, I mean close this way, all ways, to a person I didn’t even know existed six hours ago, and I’d ask myself, Is this so bad? Is this really so goddamn wrong? For me, you know, I’m not one of these guys who thinks sex is the only thing in life, but it was glorious. That’s all. Glory us.” He spelled it. “That’s how I’d think of the word.”
He’d gotten caught up and looked across to her in the dark auto. There was something soft on the radio and she found herself unable to answer him. The unguarded way he spoke about himself, as if he were somebody else, open to himself and anyone within the sound of his voice, was often breathtaking.
“It’s just when it was over,” he said. “By the end, it didn’t work. Jesus, afterwards, it was always like I could never get out of there fast enough. I don’t know what it was. Embarrassed, I guess. You know, that creature need made such a big jerk out of me. Or that I’d thought she was more beautiful. But what was worst was probably just seeing how separate we were. At the end of things. She was here, with whatever it was—her classes tomorrow at cosmetology school and her dad, a copper cold-cocking himself with brandy every night, and her mom saying novenas. She had her life and our minute hadn’t really changed anything. All the women—I never spent the night. Even when I was single. Even Lorraine. After we were engaged, you know, naturally. But not before. And even there, the first few times—I mean, she was like, Robbie, come on already. So I stayed. But I didn’t sleep. Not a wink.
“But next year, two years from now, whenever it happens,” he said, with the same unruffled knowledge of the future and himself, “give me three single-malt whiskeys on a Friday night, give me the wh
ole scene, the jostling by the bar, the jokes, the cigarettes, the shouting over the music so loud it feels like big wings beating the air—give me the whole shot and I’ll believe it. Big time. The Myth. I’ll be right back there, spotting somebody across the room and thinking, Yeah, she’s it, if I can get with her, I’ll be great.”
Evon had no trouble envisioning that. She could see him, with two or three Sylvias attending him, the dashing millionaire lawyer catching sight of someone else, younger, prettier, more perfect, the one who for a second could make him better than he was. A throb of what had passed through her in the bar briefly revisited and Evon looked out the window at the hulking dark buildings of the city. He’d ask that perfect young woman what numbers she liked, even or odd. She knew that much. He laughed when she predicted that, asking him what would come next.
“Everybody likes even numbers,” he said. “That’s how it turns out.”
“So what do you say then?”
“I don’t know. I’d probably tell you about me. What I like, don’t like. I didn’t like horror movies when I was a kid and I still don’t. I bet you do, right?”
“Right.”
“Sure. But I like thunder. Most people don’t like thunder. Bam! I think that’s a gas.” He smacked his gloves together.
And then? she asked.
“I’d probably ask you what you’re afraid of. You know, really scared of. That’s a great one.”
“And what kind of answers do you get?”
“Well, it depends how drunk you are, how honest. I’ve heard it all. Breast cancer. That’s a very big one. Driving at night or on snow. Rape, naturally. Spiders. Rodents. Elevators. One woman—I really dug her for this—she told me that there’s some little piece of her that still gets scared when she hears the toilet flush. And there’s a lot of stuff people can’t really name: Things that go bump in the night. The bogeyman.”
“And what do you tell them you’re scared of?”
