“Promise,” she said.
“And you’ll never go near Isaac?”
“Never.”
He turned to Eddie. “What should I do?”
“Let me have her, boss. She’s a rotten bitch.”
Sal cracked her once more for good measure.
“Do you love me, Margaret?”
The blood mingled with the noises she made.
“Do you love me, Margaret?”
She was mute.
“Ice her,” Sal said. “I don’t give a shit.” And he shambled in his pajamas to a different room.
Eddie grinned.
She whirled around with blood on her tongue and struck him under his Adam’s apple with her own little fist. Eddie wanted to cough. He looked like a startled animal with those yellowish eyes. Margaret found a kitchen knife and cut his throat. Her arm danced out like a surgeon or a princess of Odessa, waiting to eat the flesh of little boys.
26
Isaac wandered into the other cellblocks. There was no Big Blue to bother him. He began teaching courses to the inmates. He wouldn’t lecture on penal codes. He talked philosophy and science. He would clip articles from journals and mention the arrow of time. “There’s a scientist at Oxford or Cambridge who lives in a wheelchair and believes that if the universe ever started to contract, time would flow in the other direction, and the cradle itself would become our grave. We’d be growing younger by the minute.”
The screws had no tolerance for Isaac’s speculations. The Rasties thought he was profaning the Lion of Judah. The Latinos figured he was cracked, like some cucaracha that had lived too long. But the Muslims listened to Isaac. They argued with him that Allah had created the world, not some scientist in a wheelchair. And what was a man’s worth if he grew into a baby and forgot all about God?
Isaac didn’t have an answer. He returned to his own ward. Someone was waiting for him. Maurice had come out of his little jail in the roofs of the Christy Mathewson Club. His nose was running, and he trembled as he sat near the steam pipe.
“You’re nibbling cocaine, aren’t you?”
“I can’t help it, Isaac. I’ve been hiding too long.”
Isaac grabbed him by the collar. “Well, you come back without a runny nose.”
“I might never get there,” Maurie said.
“What happened? Did LeComte give you the green light? He doesn’t need you now that the melamed is permanently damaged. He’s not so interested in Jerry DiAngelis. What kind of deal did you make?”
“Not a deal,” Maurie mumbled. “He sent down a kite that I wouldn’t get hurt if I took care of you in court.”
“He must have known where you were. Did he arrive at the club one afternoon?”
“Yes.”
“Have a drink at the bar?”
“Yes.”
“And whistled your name?”
“Yes.”
“I thought so. Now get out of here, Maurie, and clean up your fucking act.”
He couldn’t stop shivering. He’d established his own little law library in Isaac’s cell and the visitors’ room. The isolation ward had become a feast of papers, files, and books. “I’m no good,” he’d moan. “It’s been a year, Isaac, a whole year since I’ve been inside a courtroom.”
“Then put on some dark glasses and go down to State Supreme Court. Snoop as much as you want, but don’t die on me, Maurie.”
“I’m no good.”
Isaac began to throttle him in front of the child molesters. “I’ll kill you, Maurie. I mean it.”
“You could find another lawyer.”
“There are no other lawyers. There’s only you.”
“But I can’t face Michaelson’s fucking Three Sisters.”
“You’ll eat them up,” Isaac said.
“They’re a powerhouse.”
“So am I.”
“Then tell me, lover, how come you’re wearing prison pants and Michaelson is sitting on his fanny at Maiden Lane?”
“I like it here.”
“That doesn’t help our case.”
Maurie rocked along in his little library, muttering at Isaac and the child molesters, who got in his way. Sometimes he’d forget to go home and Maurie would camp out with his law books, sleep on a cot that Isaac borrowed from Salinger himself. The screws delivered coffee and pizza pies. He began offering advice. He set up a little law clinic in the isolation ward. He learned that Macho had been falsely accused. Some overambitious assistant D.A. had brought Macho in to take the heat off a couple of black neighborhoods in the Bronx.
“He’s retarded, Isaac, can’t you tell? They never even read him his rights. He was wandering in the streets when they picked him up.”
Maurie shaved, went to the Bronx, and got the district attorney’s office to drop the charges. Maurie was declared the miracle man of Riker’s. But Macho didn’t want to leave his friends. He’d been making progress with Isaac’s alphabet books.
Isaac growled at Maurie. “Damn you,” he said. “The fucking cure is worse than the crime. Where’s the kid gonna go? They’ll pick him up all over again and he’ll fall right back into the same clock.”
“Fine. But what happens after you split?”
“We’ll worry about that later,” Isaac said.
And Macho became one more invisibilito at Riker’s. But Maurie’s reputation didn’t suffer.
“Hey, miracle man,” the Muslims called out from their cellblocks, “what you gonna do for me?”
The screws would bring him extra shirts and started to shuttle Maurie from Riker’s to this court and that. The warden complained to Isaac.
“This is highly irregular, you know.”
“But it’s good business. The inmates have a champion. Don’t take away their hope. Even if it’s one more fucking illusion.”
“You’re too philosophical for me, Commissioner Sidel. I have to deal with politics.”
“Salinger,” Isaac said, “Maurie is the best politics you’ll ever have.”
The counselor’s confidence was coming back. He dressed in clean shirts, visited his boyfriends, attended Republican and Democratic balls. He arrived one afternoon in a tux. “I saw Michaelson last night. He was looking glum. He never intended to have you sit so long. I think I can get you out of Riker’s.”
“But no strings, Maurie.”
“I promise.”
He returned from Maiden Lane with a heaviness around his shoulders. “It’s the Three Sisters. They’re a bad influence on Boris. They won’t let him rip up the indictment. They have this dumb idea that they can win in court. They’ve been reaching, Isaac, reaching far as they can get.”
Maurice lived inside his tuxedo. He neglected to wash. He would go back and forth between Riker’s and Maiden Lane, back and forth, as the Three Sisters assembled their case against Isaac Sidel. Maurie read the depositions and police reports, counted off the witnesses those Sisters had, and pondered the evidence.
He was shivering again.
“For God’s sake, Maurie, what’s the matter?”
“They subpoenaed your bank accounts.”
“Big deal. If they find more than a thousand dollars, they’re welcome to it.”
“And your safety-deposit box.”
“Have a heart, Maurie. I need a place to store my birth certificate, don’t I?”
“But the Bank of North China?”
“Chinatown is near Headquarters. And I know the bank manager. He sponsors a baseball club for the Police Athletic League.”
“Isaac, they went into the vault. The Three Sisters, two City marshals, and their own locksmith. They discovered six hundred thousand dollars in your box, all in hundred-dollar bills.”
“That’s crazy,” Isaac said, stepping over Maurice’s little sea of law books. “It’s a plant.”
“Isaac, we’d better start bargaining with them.”
“No. Who are their witnesses?”
“Well, there’s McCall.”
“They’d h
ave to go with the chief of Internal Affairs. But McCall isn’t out to sink me.”
“They have you on camera, Isaac, visiting Jerry DiAngelis and the melamed. Don’t you get it? They’ll say it was DiAngelis who gave you the six hundred thou … who is Burton Bortelsman? He’s also on the list. Oh, God. Is he the head of your secret service? Isaac, the government got to him. Give up.”
“Who else?” Isaac muttered. “Who else?”
“Teddy DiAngelis.”
“The FBI wouldn’t lend him to the Sisters. He’s their star rat.”
“But if they’re not going after Jerry, they don’t need him anymore.”
“Maurice, it doesn’t make sense. LeComte lets you out of the bag and then gives Teddy Boy to the Sisters.” Isaac’s whole head went dark. His sideburns froze to his face. “Maurie, did you deal me away? Are you my fucking Judas?”
Maurice met the fury in Isaac’s eyes. “If I was going to play Judas,” he said, “it wouldn’t be at Riker’s Island.”
And so Isaac prepared to celebrate his own doom. Six hundred thousand dollars. Teddy would pin him to that bundle, and Burt would only have to talk like an Afrikaner in the witness box and that would be the end of Isaac. But he couldn’t figure LeComte. What was Justice getting out of this other than Isaac’s scalp? Was it revenge for having been the Hamilton Fellow who went away?
He wouldn’t shave before court appearances. The judge was a Bronx Democrat who rose on the bench until he arrived at State Supreme Court. He’d never cared for Isaac’s shenanigans. His name was Richard Dorn. He was an enormous man whose corpulence seemed to reign in any room he was in. It took weeks to select a jury. Isaac would sit at the defense table while Maurie, who looked as ragged as he did, would duel with Michaelson’s Three Sisters over the fate of prospective jurors. Isaac never even watched a juror’s face, but he was fascinated with the Sisters, who seemed to work the court like one long-legged spider. Their bodies moved in tandem. They had a flow, a lyrical line, that Isaac hadn’t seen before. They never argued. They had a certain clairvoyance, a collective desire to do Isaac in. Now he understood why Maurie was reluctant to go against Boris’ girls. It was like battling a merciless, single-minded army.
“Isaac,” Maurice said in the middle of jury selection. “I think we ought to deal.”
“Fuck the Three Sisters.”
“You’ll be doing heavy time.”
“Then I’ll sit with Tiger John in Green Haven and play chess.”
“Tiger John is too dumb to play chess. He’s the silliest police commissioner we ever had.”
“But he was as loyal as a saint,” Isaac said. “Go on, Maurice. Pick your jury.”
And meanwhile Justice Dorn looked at Isaac with all the weight his body would allow. Isaac knew where Dorn’s sympathies were. With the Three Sisters.
The trial began after another month. Isaac would wash in the early morning, put on his bum’s clothes, and some screw would lead him out of the isolation ward in handcuffs. He was chained to the bus that took him over the Riker’s Island Bridge to Dorn’s castle at State Supreme Court. Reporters would try to grab at him when he got off the bus.
“Isaac, give us a line, will ya?”
“I like Susan Sodaman’s legs.”
And the correction officers would herd him into the building with whoever else had been on board. He might have coffee and cake in the holding pen. People stared at him. He was Don Isacco. One more Commish who had joined the mob. Everybody at the castle seemed to know about Isaac’s gelt. It was clever of him to use a Chinese bank. The Pink Commish wasn’t even patriotic. During his long sits in the holding pen, Isaac wouldn’t consider his case. His mind would drift back to the Margaret he remembered, and his thirty years with the NYPD had been a rootless, uneventful dream. He wasn’t Dick Tracy. He was a boy in the bleachers, in love with a little dark lady from the other side of the moon.
One of the castle criers called his name. He was delivered in his handcuffs to a tiny conference room, where Maurie waited for him in a shirt that was almost as filthy as Isaacs. The counselor’s nose was running again.
“You son of a bitch. You promised me that you wouldn’t snort cocaine at my trial.”
“Isaac, I’m scared … we could ask for a postponement.”
“Maurie,” Isaac said. “I’ll meet you at the defense table.”
And that’s how Isaac’s trial began.
He was ushered into the courtroom. It was a full house. All the spectator seats were taken. The sketch artists sat with their pads. The journalists snickered among themselves and packed little sandwiches into their mouths. And the bisons, old men and women who made it their business to attend jury trials, traveling from one court to the next, monopolized most of the seats. It was like going to a circus. And Isaac was their clown of the month. He recognized Jerry and Eileen DiAngelis among the rabble. They’d brought the melamed out of his hospital bed. His face was still twisted from the stroke. But he had more dignity than the bisons. He wore a blanket around his shoulders. He was handsome in his white hair.
The bailiff marked the arrival of the judge with his own scream. “Hear ye, hear ye! Supreme Court of New York County now in session. The Honorable Richard Dorn presiding. All rise.” Justice Dorn appeared from his chambers with his considerable bulk and climbed the little stairs to his bench like a ballroom dancer. It was bad for Isaac, because this judge could control a court with a single shiver of his body. But even Isaac had to admit: God, can that fat man glide.
Dorn smiled at the Three Sisters. He had his own clerk wheel in their evidence cart. He ignored Michaelson and Maurie while he bantered with the Sisters. “I knew your dad,” he said to Trish Van Loon. He complimented Susan Sodaman on the dress she was wearing. He winked at Selma Beard.
Maurie began to broil. “Your Honor, this isn’t the Russian Tea Room. My client can’t get a fair shake when you’re enamored of the prosecution team. It’s bad enough that Mr. Michaelson has me outnumbered three to one. But what significance does Miss Sodaman’s dress have to this case?”
Isaac groaned. His counselor was burying him before Selma Beard had opened her mouth. He tried to grab Maurie’s sleeve, but Maurie pulled away and started to bang on the defense table. “This is prejudicial, Your Honor, and I want it to stop.”
The fat man peered down from his bench like an innocent owl. “Starting early, aren’t you, Goodstein?”
“Mr. Goodstein,” Maurie said. “I have to start early, or you’ll give this case to the prosecution, and I can go to bed.”
“One more outburst, Goodstein, and I’ll hold you in contempt.”
Maurie genuflected to the judge. “Most respectfully, Your Honor, I beg the court’s pardon.”
“Counselor, will you please approach the bench.”
Maurie abandoned his table in the well of the courtroom and stood at “side-bar,” that portion of the bench that was hidden from the jury’s eyes. He and the judge whispered back and forth and then Maurie returned to the table.
“Maurie,” Isaac said, “you’re killing us.”
“No I’m not. It’s like riding a mean horse. You have to stay in the saddle, or you’ll get kicked in the head.”
Selma Beards opening statement didn’t surprise Isaac. She stood near the jury box, leaned on the rail, and painted Isaac as an evil man. “The prosecution will show that Mr. Sidel deliberately and maliciously used the power of his office to obtain favors for himself, that he accepted bribes …” And while she sang her little song the other Sisters moved their shoulders to the rhythm of her words. The jurors seemed mesmerized. Boris Michaelson had the best show in town. “… and is an associate of a certain crime family headed by the DiAngelis brothers.”
Maurie rose up from the defense table. “Objection! The DiAngelis brothers are not on trial in this court. And Ms. Beard is gluing my client to some mythical crime family.”
“Sustained,” the fat man said.
“Your Honor,” Selma said. “Mr.
Sidel is our first police commissioner who is a member of the mob.’”
Maurice began to roar. “Is this a carnival, Your Honor? Because if it is, I can take my pants down and amuse the jury. I can juggle names. I can conjure up the ghost of Al Capone.”
“Goodstein,” the judge said. “I’m warning you. Behave yourself. And Ms. Beard, you will refrain from using such epithets as ‘member of the mob.’”
“But I will prove beyond a reasonable doubt that—”
“Please don’t contradict me,” the judge said, wagging his jowls.
And Selma Beard sang again with the help of her particular chorus. All Three Sisters curled their eyes to look at Isaac with such contempt that he wanted to disappear under the table.
And then it was Maurie’s time. He held the indictment in his hand like some classical scholar dreaming of Plato. He had an angelic smile. His mouth grew thin. “Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, forgive me, but this indictment is a piece of dreck. Worse. It’s a fairy tale. It’s made for children. My client is the best police commissioner the Department has ever had.”
Susan Sodaman began to titter. And suddenly Maurice had lost his audience. Spectators and jury observed Michaelson’s three little girls. No counselor could compete with them. They were dream sisters who’d driven their way into the unconscious will of the court.
Isaac’s spittle turned dark. Macho was pulled out of his hands. The Bronx district attorney had discovered where he was and delivered a writ, removing Macho from Riker’s. The boy was scared. His blue eyes seemed to narrow into tiny circles. His whole body began to twist. A vulture might have been inside the boy. And Isaac had no warrants that could save him.
Within a week Macho was trampled to death by a gang of vigilantes from the Bronx. Isaac called the acting police commissioner. “I want your best people on the case. The boy was innocent.”
“How do you know?”
“I lived with him for seven months.”
“And now you’re a maven on child molesters. Isaac, it was the Hunts Point projects. He was found with a twelve-year-old kid. They were both undressed.”
The Good Policeman (The Isaac Sidel Novels) Page 21
