S. J. Rozan

by Absent Friends

  Quietly, deliberately, Phil said, “Bullshit.”

  “I knew Jimmy! I knew them all! I was there in those days, remember?”

  “And what are you hiding?”

  Her face flushed again, became a mask of openmouthed disbelief the same color as her drink.

  “Oh, come on, Marian!” Phil slammed his beer bottle on the tabletop. People were staring at them now, but he didn't turn to look. “You came here for the truth. I'm telling you the truth, and it doesn't make you happy, it pisses you off. You're scared shitless something even worse is going to happen. What are you so afraid of?”

  Her eyes blazed at his. He hadn't had to ask the question, not really. He knew. All these years, he'd known. Though even tonight, until right now, he'd hoped he was wrong, hoped someone—Marian, even Marian—could prove to him what a mistake he'd been making. Because she'd been Jimmy McCaffery's lover back then. Because she'd know, if anyone knew.

  She didn't answer him.

  And that was answer enough.

  As if he'd said that out loud and it made her furious, Marian slapped both palms on the table and stood. She dealt a twenty-dollar bill to the tabletop in the contemptuous stroke of a gypsy turning over a card of ruin. Phil understood the insult for what it was: Money's been so important to you all these years, you bastard, well, here's more of it. She stalked out, and he watched her go. After the door drifted shut behind her, he motioned the waitress over, handed her his credit card. He covered the whole bill including the tip and left the twenty lying among the coasters and napkins, across the water-ring chain. In spite of himself he grinned as he left the bar, astonished, as he'd been so many times before, by the human capacity for costly, meaningless gestures.

  Now, in his office two days later, staring into the sky, Phil heard the echo of Marian's voice, telling him what she had called to say: that Jimmy McCaffery had left papers behind. Harry Randall, according to the second Tribune reporter, had probably seen them.

  And Phil wondered what was in those papers. And where they were. And what the hell McCaffery had been thinking, writing any of this down.

  And, he asked himself, how do you measure the meaning of a gesture—or its cost—when someone else pays?

  LAURA'S STORY

  Chapter 7

  A Hundred Circling Camps

  October 31, 2001

  Laura's head was pounding. Squinty-eyed even behind her sunglasses, she turned south from Marian Gallagher's office and stopped at the first open coffee shop she saw. Before she found it, she passed another, a place called Wally's, where a dark and ghostly interior showed through a grimy plate-glass window. Everything inside was smothered in sticky, poisonous ash. Gray coffee cups and ketchup bottles stood on a gray counter in a trickle of sunlight that was cheerfully yellow out where Laura was but gray inside. Laura tried to imagine this place, filled with the smell of toast and the splatter of frying bacon and the shouts of orders being barked back and forth, as it would have been before, as maybe in another universe it still was.

  The second coffee shop, the one she came upon two blocks later, had been scrubbed, polished, restocked, and renewed. The owner, awash in smiles, greeted her like a long-lost friend, though she'd never been there before.

  She ordered coffee; as an afterthought, she asked for a cherry Danish. Marian Gallagher's cookies had been some delicate gourmet brand, and Laura felt she deserved a reward for resisting them. Not to mention the coffee she had not had, which might have cured her headache. Although probably not. It was an article of faith with Laura that lack of caffeine in the bloodstream was the most common cause of headaches, and a dose of caffeine would melt them away, repeat as needed. This headache, though, had additional causes, and from experience Laura knew that caffeine, while it would be useful, would, like sunlight on an ice floe, not quite be enough.

  Laura pushed her mind away from the additional causes. She was working. She swirled milk and sugar into her coffee, used both hands to lift it, and drank down half with her eyes closed, instructing the caffeine to plow straight to the headache. Sometimes that worked.

  After she'd sliced a wedge off her Danish—she'd never learned to feel comfortable picking up an entire pastry and taking a bite out of it, like other New Yorkers, like Harry—she licked her fingers and reached into her bag for the tape recorder. Pressing rewind and then play, she lifted the machine to her ear, nodding to herself when she heard, as she expected to, Marian Gallagher's voice: “What do you mean? What papers?” She lifted the tape out, labeled it, and popped in another. Of course the recorder worked. It always worked. She'd done her research, consulted Consumer Reports, and chosen this brand for reliability. She rooted around in the bag for the other recorder, listened to it for a moment, too. The sound from this one was much murkier, having been recorded through canvas, but the whole interview was there.

  As Harry had taught her, as Harry had been, Laura was a great believer in backup.

  “Like a chameleon,” Harry had saluted Laura, his voice soft with admiration, when he'd worked with her enough times to have watched her, when he understood. “Like a puzzle piece changing its shape to fit in.”

  Laura remembered that conversation; she remembered she had smiled. “Okay,” she'd said. “But you want to know how I think of it?”

  “Most certainly I do.”

  “Like a virus.”

  “Explain?”

  “Isn't that how a virus works? It imitates something the cell was expecting and prepared for. The cell doesn't call in any defenses because it doesn't think it needs any. The next thing it knows, the virus is inside and the cell is giving up all its secrets.”

  “My sweet amoeba, that's disgusting.”

  He was right; but the fact that it was disgusting didn't stop Harry, after that, from calling her his precious little virus at the most surprising moments.

  Laura, heading for the Staten Island ferry, climbed a plywood slope covering the temporary cable Verizon had laid along the curbs downtown. This close to the site, a smoky scent drifted on the air. Fires were still burning under tons of dust and steel. Like everyone downtown, Laura had been smelling this odor for weeks; but still she was unsure whether it was a bitter smell, or sweet. The acridness was the scent of smoldering plastic, and steel, and jet fuel. The sweetness, she had been told, was flesh.

  The smell brought with it a familiar discomfort. She'd felt it from the first, inhaling this air, and recognized it. It was the same queasy sense that washed over her whenever Reporter-Laura crossed the line, from running after a story to trampling on private grief, from digging for facts to probing an open wound. Some things were too intimate, not made for strangers to intrude on.

  Laura focused on the work ahead. She walked the blocks trying to ignore the smell, ignoring the traffic lights, as everyone now did. When cars were finally allowed downtown once more, she knew, pedestrians would start minding the lights, and ten minutes after that they'd be jaywalking again. People, especially New Yorkers, Harry had observed a few weeks ago to the newsroom in general, were infinitely adaptable.

  Laura swept Harry's voice from her mind. She was working; she marched on. As she neared a building on Broadway, though, she found herself stopping. Small heaps of dust lay on the building's windowsills and protruding brick, but the bronze address numbers were newly burnished and they shone. The address clicked for Laura. The lawyer, Phil Constantine. The only one who'd refused to see her. He had his office here.

  Laura checked her watch. She had time. Considering, she walked away from the glass doors. It was foolish to linger outside a downtown office building: security guards, like everyone else, were on edge these days. Circling the block, Laura called up everything she knew about Phil Constantine.

  By the time she turned the corner again and approached the building's entrance, her stride had been transformed, her shoulders set. Her voice, when she spoke to Constantine, would be different from the voice that had come from her in Marian Gallagher's conference room, with its gen
tly obvious view. The distracted, bumbling girl reporter was unlikely to elicit anything but impatience from Constantine. A man like him would need an equal, a worthy opponent. All right then, Laura thought, swinging her shoulder bag down, unzipping it for the guard in the lobby, taking out whatever he asked to see, then stuffing it all back in. All right. If that's what was most likely to work on him, that's what Phil Constantine would get.

  And if that's what she gave him, Laura might get her interview.

  And for sure, another headache.

  PHIL'S STORY

  Chapter 9

  First In, Last Out

  October 31, 2001

  Phil glanced up when the outer door opened. He heard Sandra's challenge and the cocksure reply. So. Saying no hadn't worked on Laura Stone any better than it ever had on Harry Randall. Tribune reporters, he knew them. But this was Phil's way: unless he needed the press for his own purposes, he always told them to get lost. The mediocre reporters bought it and went away. It saved time and energy and left Phil to deal only with people who had something on the ball.

  He watched as Sandra sat back, dragged his book a quarter inch closer, asked the gate-crasher whether she had an appointment. Sandra didn't look at the book: she had his day memorized, his week, and his upcoming month. This was just the game it was her job to play. When the answering volley came, she'd give the icy smile, lay down the smash, and this short match would be over.

  Laura Stone looked past Sandra into Phil's office, right into his eyes. “I'm on my way to Pleasant Hills to talk to some people there. I thought Mr. Constantine might want to see me first.” This with her eyes still on Phil's.

  “Mr. Constantine doesn't see anyone without an appointment.”

  “I have a deadline. If Mr. Constantine doesn't speak to me before I have to file, Tribune readers won't get his side of the story.”

  Not bad, Phil thought. Looking only at the back of Sandra's head, he still could have described the knife blade of a smile with which she said, “I'm sorry.”

  Laura Stone said, “First in, last out.”

  Sandra was thrown. Oh, she disliked that. Phil heard her irritation: “Excuse me?”

  “People remember the first thing they read. Even if it's wrong. After that, it's hard to correct. A retraction never has the impact of the original story.”

  Below her cropped hair the back of Sandra's neck was red. She could keep this reporter at bay all day and late into the evening, Phil knew that. Especially if she got mad. But the hell with it. He was sure she had better things to do.

  “It's all right, Sandra.” Phil rose, though he didn't come out from behind his desk. Let her in, sure; trek to the border to greet her, no. “Come on in, Ms. Stone. Thanks, Sandra.”

  With Sandra's bellicose glare following her—and Elizabeth's stare also, less hair-trigger, more weights and measures—Laura Stone marched into Phil's office. She sat down and plunked her massive shoulder bag to the floor beside her. Flipping it open, she pulled out a pad, two pens, and a tape recorder. She did this so fast and so smoothly he had to figure the bag, despite its bulging, chaotic look, was the kind with dividers, holders, pockets, and tabs. Velcro and zippers and snaps. Everything in the right place, instantly accessible.

  He used one like that himself.

  Stone held up the recorder, lifted her eyebrows.

  “No,” Phil said, sitting again.

  Laura Stone dropped the machine back in the bag. Phil couldn't see whether it was running, but he assumed it was. He'd have told her to turn it off, but the second one, which she was almost sure to have, would be running, too. His choices were: he could search her, including patting her down to see if she was wired, or he could watch his mouth.

  “I'm here to give you a chance to comment on the death of Harry Randall,” Stone began, colonizing a chair, ankle on knee, elbows out, taking up more room than he'd have thought such a thin woman could. She flipped open her pad, held her pen poised.

  Phil grinned. How about that? Another woman offering him an opportunity to do something he didn't want to do. “I told you this morning I had nothing to say.”

  “I didn't believe you.”

  “Does telling people that work in your business?”

  “Does blowing off reporters work in yours?”

  “Ms. Stone, with all due respect, after the last couple of weeks, why the hell would I want to talk to the Tribune?”

  “To correct any misconceptions, I'd think.”

  “Yeah, I bet that's what you'd think. But all right. About Harry Randall's death?” He glanced at the ceiling, frowned, nodded. “Harry Randall was a fixture in this town. A fine example of the old-fashioned muckraking reporter. They don't make them like that anymore. New York needs him now more than ever, it's a goddamn shame what happened to him, and he'll be missed.” He smiled, slid his chair back from his desk to give himself room to cross his long legs. Ankle on knee. “You can quote me.”

  She wrote as he spoke, quick sure strokes, and he studied her as she wrote. In that wholesome midwestern way, the way that called up the bucolic farming life (early morning rising, direct and sweaty work, lit evening windows, neighbors bringing pies), Laura Stone was pretty. Straight brown hair brushing her shoulders, features small and neat, pale skin that would probably be smooth and clear once she got some sleep. Phil's forebears were rabbis and ragpickers, salesmen and stevedores. Not a farmer among them, back to the windswept horizon. Why, then, this—not just attraction, no, not only desire—this wistful nostalgia, this homesickness a woman like this had always been able to make him feel? Her bedroom: heightening heat and the crescendo of pounding hearts under quilts in the crystal winter night; but also the breeze through the window of her sunny kitchen on a spring morning. Her soft skin, her soft hair, the feel of them under his fingertips; but even more her quiet companionship by the fire on a blustery fall day. He longed for all that, at the same time—maybe for the same reason—as he knew he'd last maybe a week in that lonesome prairie farmhouse.

  Someone who's homesick for somewhere they've never been, Phil thought. The definition of an American.

  Laura Stone stopped writing and flipped her hair from her face. It fell back to exactly where it had been. “If I print that,” she said to him, “people will know you're lying.”

  What the hell had they been talking about? Oh, right, his tribute to Harry Randall. “Everyone who reads your paper already thinks I'm lying,” he said.

  “Then set them straight. Now's your chance.”

  Hey, there's an idea. Just tell the truth. After all these years? Then what had been the point? Though, when you looked at this mess, what had been the goddamn point anyway? “No. Thanks.”

  “You were Mark Keegan's attorney in 1979?”

  “That's public record.”

  “Keegan was accused and convicted of possessing an illegal handgun—the gun that killed Jack Molloy—but not of the killing itself. Why not?”

  “That was the plea deal.”

  “Your idea?”

  “The opposition's.”

  “The District Attorney's?” Her eyebrows went up as if she needed more light in those morning-colored eyes.

  “Yes.”

  “What did you think?”

  “I thought if we went to trial on the manslaughter charge, we were screwed. I couldn't believe I was being offered the deal, but I jumped at it.”

  “Why did they do it, do you think?”

  “A bird in the hand.”

  “Nothing else?”

  “It didn't matter to me.”

  “But you think there might have been something else?”

  “There always is. An election's coming up. The accused looks like the ADA's cousin. They don't want to waste time and money on a first-timer who killed a gangster they're happy to have out of the way.”

  “Or someone buys off someone in the DA's office.”

  “It happens.”

  “In this case?”

  “Who the hell knows? If
anyone was up to anything, it wasn't me. My client got a hell of a better deal than I thought he'd get, going in. That was all I cared about.”

  Laura Stone turned her head, as though looking around Phil's office, taking in the books, the pictures, and the mess. What was she, Elizabeth's age? No, a little older. The age he'd been when Markie Keegan was assigned to him. The fingertips of her left hand lifted to her temple, pressed. Headache? Or maybe he was supposed to think she had one, so he'd be gentle with her.

  He waited to see.

  Laura Stone brought her eyes back to him. “It didn't turn out so well for Mark Keegan, that deal.”

  “You think that's the fault of the deal?”

  She wrote and moved on. Plainly, what she thought wasn't a topic of this meeting. “What's your relationship with Mark Keegan's widow?”

  “Private.”

  “You and Sally Keegan have been intimate since you met, isn't that true?”

  No, it's not true. Markie'd been in jail five months and dead sixteen before the foggy cold night on the Staten Island ferry when I first kissed Sally. “No comment.”

  “What's your relationship with Edward Spano?”

  Ah, Eddie. I knew we'd get to Eddie. “No comment.”

  “Is it true you were taking money from Spano all these years and passing it on to Mark Keegan's family?”

  Not directly. Not that I knew about. “No comment.”

  “But you don't deny the money didn't come from New York State?”

  “That's public record.”

  “Where did it come from?”

  Wish to hell I knew. “No comment.”

  “You're acquainted with Marian Gallagher? Of More Art, New York? And the McCaffery Fund?”

  “Yes.”

  “Ms. Gallagher suggested that you, as the attorney handling the payments, would have to know the source of the funds.”

  “Did she?”

  “Would you care to comment on that?”

  “No.”