by Todd Merer
SHU was hard time. Six cement surfaces with a bright light on 24-7. A food tray passed through a slot and, every third day, a shackled walk along the cell block. No radio, no books, no nothing.
Except for me. Max shared Nacho’s likeability, and I visited him regularly. He was an optimist who saw the path to freedom and walked straight down it. In a flurry of proffers, Max gave up a lot of heavy information I was sure would result in a substantial sentence reduction. Videos and affidavits confirming the president and extended first family of a Caribbean nation were deeply involved in the drug trade. Soon, North Valley Cartel guys Max had fingered were being arrested. A few at first, then a stream that became a torrent, then the dam burst and the North Valley Cartel washed away.
Kandi let Max languish in solitary for a year before sending him back to complete his sentence without according him any credit for the new cooperation. I was stunned. Kandi’s rationale was that Max had been working in New York; therefore, he hadn’t had personal dealings with the Colombian-based guys he spoke about. Hence, no personal dealings, no value as a witness, and besides, plenty of guys were lining up to testify against those Max had first pointed at. He’d been the goose that laid the golden egg that cracked into pieces like Humpty Dumpty.
“Max was the first to kick the can down the road,” I had protested. “Isn’t valuable intelligence cooperation?”
“We already knew his rap. He just corroborated what others said.”
“No, the others corroborated him. Corroboration is cooperation.”
“Good point.” For a moment, I thought she was serious, but it turned out she was just toying with me. “Thing is, it’s a judgment call. I judged not.”
“After keeping him in the hole for an entire year?”
“If you can’t do the time, don’t do the crime.”
Fortunately, the conversation was on the phone, or I would’ve punched her lights out. Hitting a woman? That woman? You betcha.
In any event, our disagreement soon was moot. Faced with the evidence, the Caribbean president was allowed a golden parachute that dropped him in a prosperous country that welcomed all stripes of wealthy men. And even as I was preparing a long-shot motion for the government to be directed to reward Max’s cooperation, a North Valley sicario had murdered Max in jail.
At this moment, Kandi was working two phones at the same time, talking on one and texting on the other. Despite her many faults, she was totally dedicated to her job. The problem was how she performed it. In the past, she’d been sanctioned for hiding discovery evidence and behaving inappropriately with counsel: rude and aggressive to those who dare fight; overly generous with those who kiss her ring.
She glanced my way, then turned her back.
Fine with me. I didn’t mind not looking at her. In her salad days, Kandi was pretty in the zaftig way Long Island princesses can be, but that was then: now she’s more Botox than flesh, and her face is plasticized into a permanent frown, as if she’s wondering who farted.
I know I sound immature, but I truly detest this woman. Not only is she a liar; she’s totally corrupt. While proffering cooperators, she wins them over with homemade cookies, then covertly name-drops certain lawyers—like her old former-prosecutor buddy Dreidel. If the accused switches lawyers to Dreidel, a kickback winds up in her purse. Too bad I couldn’t prove it, so I just had to grimace and bear her.
One of the agents—tall, pale hair, pitted cheeks—flashed me a horsey smile. He seemed familiar, but I couldn’t make a connection.
“Mr. Bluestone?” he said, approaching with another agent. “Charles Scally. Call me Chaz. This handsome guy is my partner, Nelson Cano. Say hello, Nelly.”
Cano grunted. He was a stocky Latino in jeans, sneakers, and a parka. Given his look, he probably worked the streets and wasn’t happy wasting a morning in court.
“You’re the case agent?” I said to Scally, slightly surprised. I figured he was on the far side of forty, an age when most agents have become group supervisors. Then again, Bolivar’s case was six years old, so probably Scally’s presence was a vintage rerun. He’d begun the case and now would finish it.
He chuckled. “You know how it is. Just when you think you’re out of the business, they pull you back in.”
Kandi held her palm out to Scally, snapped, “Pen.”
Color patched Scally’s cheeks. His lips formed an unspoken word: Bitch. Cano leaned between them and gave Kandi a pen.
I thought this was odd. Kandi usually was close with her agents—often too close, openly flirting with them. I remembered a proffer during which she’d referred to a couple of young agents as Mr. September and Mr. October. Clearly, it wasn’t that way with Scally. Maybe Scally didn’t fit her teenage fantasies. She sure didn’t fit his.
The courtroom door opened, and a clerk leaned out. “The judge is ready.”
We entered the courtroom. The clerk handed me Bolivar’s pretrial report. I quickly scanned it: he was forty-one years old, in good health, no US address. The rest of the fill-ins were blank, including his citizenship. Maybe he’d declined to answer; guys often do that.
The pen door opened, and marshals led Bolivar out. Even in jailhouse blues, he managed to appear dignified. Two of the marshals were women. I heard one say to another, “TDH, definitely.”
True, Bolivar was tall, dark, and handsome. I flicked a sideways glance and caught Kandi checking Bolivar out. I went before the bench. Bolivar stood at my right, Kandi on my left. Her perfume was cloying.
“All rise.”
Judge Trieant doddered to the bench, then slumped behind it. He was a mean bastard when I first started lawyering and since then had become meaner. He still wore his trademark waxed handlebar mustache: the one that had earned him the nickname Oilcan Harry when he was a prosecutor. Nowadays, Trieant didn’t talk much, and when he did, it was unpleasant.
The clerk called the case, and Kandi entered her appearance. I entered mine, waived a formal reading of the indictment, and entered a plea of not guilty.
“I’ll hear the government as to bail,” Trieant said.
Kandi went into a boilerplate rap about the defendant having been a fugitive, that it was likely that if released on bail he wouldn’t return, blah, blah, blah.
I still hadn’t gotten an update from Natty Grable as to a bail package. I said, “The defendant consents to an order of detention but reserves the right to argue bail at a later date.”
“Discovery?” Trieant barked.
“Will be provided soon,” Kandi said. “Within the month.”
“Moving on,” Trieant said, setting a motion schedule and a trial date of July 6. He banged his gavel and stood.
“All rise.”
Trieant doddered from the bench. Bolivar was led away. Kandi said, “Let me know when your client’s ready to proffer.”
“Whip up a batch of cookies,” I said. “Hit the tanning salon. Then stand by your Shalimar, and wait for my call.”
She smiled. “I’m going to destroy you, Bluestone.”
“Wear black. Makes you look thinner.”
Unbelievable how two grown-ups, professionals both, can behave so childishly. I left the courthouse.
When I’d entered, the wind had been at my back. Coming out was like leaning into the teeth of a gale. Head down and hands deep in pockets, I crossed the park, and as I climbed the gray stone steps in front of the Brooklyn War Memorial, I realized why Scally seemed familiar:
He was a dead ringer for Marshal George Maledon.
Let no guilty man escape.
I shuddered but not from the cold. As I hurried from the park, I saw the Flex idling in the street, but as I headed toward it—
CHAPTER 30
I stopped short to avoid colliding with a woman coming toward me. The sun was in my eyes, and in the glare I couldn’t see her face, only a surround of silvery halo. She spoke in a soft voice nearly snatched by the wind.
“Did I come too late for court?”
I moved t
o get the sun out of my eyes and saw, within a hood of silver fur, Jilly’s flawless face. “I’m afraid you did.”
“Oh no. What happened?”
“Not much. Too cold to talk here. Where’s your car?”
“My car? Oh. I took a taxi.”
“Come.” I cupped her elbow and helped her into the Flex, then got in myself. When she was done shivering, I told her the court appearance had been brief, a formality. “What happened with the bail package?”
“Natty said to say he’s working on it. He asked me to go to court so I could tell you.”
“And to spy and see if I was any good.”
“No, it wasn’t like that—”
“Only serious. Tell him I was great. And get yourselves a pair of working phones, will ya?”
She forced a smile. We drove in awkward silence. City light through the windows striped her face with a repetitious shadow: one moment she was luminous, the next a shadow, over and over. We’d been crossing the Brooklyn Bridge, whose girders threw the shadows. We slowed for traffic in a shadow. In the dimness, her mouth was opened like a night flower. I was about to put my lips on hers—
Val said, “Where to?”
She replied to Val in the same soft way she spoke to me. A bit of charm, a hint of flirt. It was a country thing, I supposed. Val had been a war refugee and mistrusted attractive women; they were users. He’d seen them twist commanders and commissars alike around their little pinkies. Bread for bed. He’d clearly initially disliked Jilly but had softened now that she’d acknowledged him. He kept cutting glances at her in the rearview. Couldn’t blame him, she was so insanely beautiful.
She leaned against her window, looking up as we came off the bridge. I followed her gaze up forty stories to the colonnaded top of the Municipal Building, where a golden statue of a woman gleamed in the sun.
The same statue she had viewed through Natty’s telescope. As we passed the building, she turned to keep it in sight. Her eyes were moist. She caught me looking at her and averted her face.
Val turned west on Houston. The address Jilly had given him was on the border of the West Village and SoHo. A trendy joint.
“Here we are,” I said, but she didn’t move. “What’s wrong?”
She shook her head. “Nothing. I just feel . . . low.”
“Been there, done that a few hundred thousand times and still counting. In the mood to talk?”
She chewed her lower lip with that ever-so-slightly crooked upper incisor, then gave me a faint smile.
“Take a girl to lunch?”
CHAPTER 31
The hotel restaurant’s lunch crowd was typically downtown: swinging dicks and great-looking women.
But Jilly turned heads as we entered. The seating person deferentially led us to a corner booth. I swept my hand for Jilly to sit facing the room, but she chose to face the wall. I asked what wine she preferred, and she said whatever I liked. I ordered a top-of-the-list Super Tuscan. We didn’t speak until the wine came, but after a sip, Jilly leaned across the table and spoke softly.
“I don’t have a single friend I trust,” she said. “I mean, a friend I can really trust. But I feel, I don’t know why, that I can trust you. Can I, Benn?”
I thought the question weirdly sudden, perhaps the opening to another chapter. Can you trust me? Oh yes. Do you trust me?
“Absolutely,” I said.
Her fingertips touched atop my hand. She took another sip of wine. “The only friend I ever trusted was my momma. She had me when she was real young. Raised me all by her lonesome. While I was in school, she wrote her memoirs. And at night, I’d tell her what I learned, and she’d read me what she wrote. Between you and me, her memoirs were kind of scrambled. Didn’t really matter, because the title said it all: I, Centerfold.”
I understood. In my trophy hall of memories are two Playmates and a Pet. Unsettled women, all. Damaged. Understandable. Pipe-smoking Hef and gold-chained Bob were the reasons why I never wore pajamas or jewelry.
“Momma’s claim to fame? Voted the best Miss April, ever. The day after high-school graduation, I told Momma I wanted to go see the world. She cried a little and made me promise to always use a condom. So I got on the Greyhound and waved goodbye to Filly, and two days later I was here in the big city.”
“Your mom’s name is Filly?”
“Filly, for Filomena. Was.”
“Sorry.”
An awkward moment, but then Jilly’s phone rang. She fished it from her bag and looked at the screen and put a finger to her lips for me to keep mum. I could hear a man’s voice but couldn’t make out the words. She flashed me a brittle smile, then spoke into the phone.
“I’m having lunch,” she said. “Of course, I’m alone.”
She hung up the phone but wouldn’t look at me. I wondered if she was talking to Natty. Or the man she’d been with at Foto’s party. Painful to think of a woman like this with men like that—
Speaking of which, a guy with curly hair and cupid lips appeared at the table. He leaned over me and double air-kissed Jilly.
“Hello, Rafe,” she said. “Benn, Raphael Borg.”
I knew of Borg, one of my dirtier secrets being that I read Page Six, in which Borg’s publicist made sure he was regularly mentioned as a model-dating, mogul-baiting, bad-boy super lawyer. But the real skinny in the legal community was that Borg couldn’t lawyer his way out of a paper bag. He wore a leather jacket collar-up over a muscle tee and had a smart-alecky attitude that made you want to slap him. At least, I did.
“Sorry,” he said. “Didn’t catch your name.”
“Rafe, this is Benn Bluestone,” Jilly said.
“The Benn Bluestone?” he said. “Oh wow. I’m in awe. We got to get to know each other, man. Break some bread, whatever. But right now, me and Jilly have some important things to bat around. You stay, enjoy your wine, hit on a model. You want, I’ll introduce you to one.”
“That’s okay.”
“Sure. Another time.” He winked at me, then turned to Jilly. “C’mon, sweetness.”
“Give me a minute,” she said.
“Give you thirty seconds, honey.”
Rafe went to the bar. We didn’t speak, but Jilly read my face. “Rafe’s really not the way he seems.”
“Depends on what you mean by seems.”
“He’s just protective of me. He handles my investments. So many documents they make my head swim. I mean, I can’t even keep track of my laundry tickets. If it weren’t for Rafe, I’d be lost. Look at him, waiting. I know that look. Business to discuss. Papers to sign. Thank you for the wine, Benn. I’m so glad we’re friends.”
“To the end and thereafter,” I said.
I left Jilly to her other lawyer.
On the way uptown, Val said, “I can say something?”
“You will, anyway. Go on.”
“For fifteen minutes, that woman stands in cold, looking at court. When you come out, she pretends to walk there. Not so. She waits for you the whole time.”
“You saw her arrive in a taxi?”
Val shook his head. “No taxi. She come in gray stretch with a front grille looking like the face of some kind of dog. A, ah . . .”
“Bulldog,” I said.
CHAPTER 32
When I got back to the office, I called Foto and asked why he hadn’t told me who Jilly was from the start.
“I didn’t know from the start. You doing her?”
“None of your business. No.”
“Good. Keep it that way.”
I sat at my computer and researched the golden statue of the woman that crowned the Municipal Building—the one that had so captured Jilly’s attention through the telescope. Turned out to be a strange and sad story. The real-life model for the statue had been an actress named Audrey Munson. Well known in her day, she was a beautiful woman who’d come to the city in search of fame and fortune but, despite the golden statue that became her legacy, had come to a bad end. Made me wonder if the woman remind
ed Jilly of herself.
The next day Val drove me to MDC, the Brooklyn federal jail.
It’s located on a spur of Sunset Park bounded by the Gowanus Expressway and New York Harbor, an isolated neighborhood of enormous old warehouses erected during World War II, back when the area was known as the Brooklyn Army Terminal, Uncle Sam’s round-the-clock man-and-materiel point of embarkation to the European Theatre. Now, it was mostly vacant but for a scatter of light industry, and after dark its only inhabitants were the staff and inmates of MDC’s two jails, which sat side by side on a street dead-ending at an old pier jutting into the harbor. The old jail was a converted terminal warehouse; the new jail a concrete box whose slab face was lined with slit windows.
Val pulled into a spot in front of the new jail. When I got out of the Flex, the wind blowing off the water nearly knocked me down. The flag above the jail entrance was snapping furiously, its lanyard clinking hollowly against the pole. I hurried up the front steps and came in from the bitter cold.
Better. Unlike the lonely place that was FDC Miami, MDC Brooklyn was my home turf. Same familiar lobby, same friendly guard.
“What’s up, Bonesy?”
“Nice tie, Counselor.”
I filled out a legal-visit form and signed in the attorney-admissions book, scribbling my and my client’s names unintelligibly, the better to veil my doings from other defense lawyers, ever eager to poach.
I passed through a metal detector and got my hand stamped in invisible ink. Entered an air lock where the jail brain—CONTROL—was hidden behind a dark window. Set below the window was a black light. I put my hand beneath it, and the invisible stamp of the daily password glowed fluorescent green.
How many times had I done this? A thousand? More? No matter, the ritual never changed. What did change was the daily password, and the hand that was stamped. One day the left hand; next day the right. As often as not, the stamp is applied poorly, leaving a green florescent smear instead of a password. But so long as there was a visible glow, CONTROL loudspoke its approval.
