by Tim Green
At the airport, Jake used the time he had waiting to board for making calls to his best and closest contacts in television. Those he couldn’t reach, he left vague messages of warning. Those he reached, he urged to hold back on their criticism of Casey, saying he knew firsthand that Graham was distorting the truth. The reaction he got left him despondent as he handed his ticket to the woman at the gate, and nearly certain that-if anything-his efforts had only made things worse. Even the good reporters he spoke with couldn’t completely disguise their giddy delight in such a salacious story.
The plane landed on time. Jake got to Legal Sea Foods before six and, as promised, ordered oysters, beer, and the famous clam chowder. The chowder cooled. Jake ate his and made three unanswered calls to Don’s phone. He finished his first pint and drank Don’s, ordering two more and telling his waitress that nothing was wrong with the oysters as far as he knew, he was just waiting for a friend.
He looked at his watch and punched in Don’s home phone. If he had to, he’d show up at the door. He’d knock until Don answered or his wife let Jake in. Sarah was his wife. She’d invite him in and chastise Don, three weeks on the road or not. Sarah loved American Sunday, and she knew the favor Jake had done for Don, saving the career of a friend who probably didn’t deserve it.
He looked at his watch again and hit send when the chair across from him barked out and Don slumped down in it.
“I called you three times,” Jake said, snapping his phone shut. “My next step was the doorbell.”
Don crimped his lips and nodded that he expected nothing else. Jake leaned over and peered at the briefcase Don held in his lap.
“For me?” Jake asked, forcing a big stupid smile.
Don nodded his head and took a long drink from the pint glass in front of him.
“Oyster?” Jake said, tilting the silver tray, its ice reduced to a pool of cold water that dribbled onto the table.
Don stabbed one with a small fork, slathered it in cocktail sauce, and slurped it down. He ate three more before taking another drink, leaning back, and meeting Jake’s eye. He lifted the briefcase and extracted a file, holding it up.
“You can have this,” Don said. “It’s all stuff you’d ferret out sooner or later if you found the right old-timers, but I can’t talk about Graham. I can’t give you anything on him.”
“Are you fucking kidding me?” Jake asked, his mouth going slack.
Don stared hard at him and his eyes flickered around the immediate area. “It’s an active investigation. I can’t.”
“Active?”
Don nodded. “And that’s all I’m saying.”
“Because he is connected to these guys, these old mobsters turned legitimate, or more legitimate, anyway,” Jake said.
“They used to be called the Arm,” Don said, pushing the file past the plate of oysters, “an extension of New York’s five families with a seat on their council. At their peak, they ran all of upstate New York and Ohio, and they had interests in Vegas. Napoli was never out front, but my guy said he had Niko Todora’s ear, and as Todora’s star rose, Napoli was always right there with him. He was a lawyer and a master at staying just this side of the law, stretching things, directing Todora’s muscle and showing him how to make money without having to worry about wearing prison stripes. Napoli could have been consigliere if he wanted, but he never stepped into the spotlight, and then the whole organization dropped out of gambling and whores and drugs.
“My guy from Philly said it was like they just one day disappeared from the world of crime, cashed in their chips, and started legitimate businesses: plumbing fixtures, chicken wings, a travel agency, insurance, casinos, porn. It didn’t take long for others to fill the void: Asians, blacks, a couple motorcycle gangs. The Italians just let it go.”
Jake opened the file and saw black-and-white photos of Napoli taken at a distance, before he needed the wheelchair, standing outside a sandwich shop with an arm on the shoulder of another man in a suit who was as big as a bear, and both of them wearing grimacing expressions somewhere between humor and death.
“That’s Napoli with Todora,” Don said, sucking down another oyster.
“You’re telling me everything without telling me,” Jake said, “but I don’t have time for a treasure hunt. It’ll take weeks to dig through these businesses and unravel everything to find the connection to Graham, and I don’t have time.”
Don sipped his beer, staring over the lip of the glass. He shook his head.
“You can follow me home and sleep outside my bedroom door,” Don said, wiping his mouth with the napkin and rising from the table, “but I’m not going there with you. Did you not hear me? It’s an active investigation. All the strippers in Newark couldn’t save me if I leak this. I gave you everything I can, and more than I ever thought existed, and now I’m going home to finish Monopoly and probably lose because my son will have stolen about three thousand dollars from the bank. Thanks for the oysters.”
Jake stood up, too, and looked at his watch. If he hurried, he could catch the 7:05 flight back. He shook Don’s hand and said, “Sorry I had to bring up the marker.”
Don narrowed his eyes. “There’s a woman in all this.”
“Sort of.”
“That’s okay,” Don said. “Now all I’ve got left is seven years on my mortgage.”
Jake put a fifty-dollar bill down on the table and followed his friend out of the restaurant into the steady flow of weary travelers. As Jake headed for the gates, Don peeled off toward the baggage claim, then turned back.
“Jake?” he said, nodding at the file Jake held. “These guys may be below the radar with what they’re into these days, but if they catch you poking around, don’t forget who they are.”
“Some Italian American businessmen,” Jake said with half a wave.
Don shook his head. “That’s what I’m saying. They’re more than that. It’s a different playground, but trust me, they’re using the same toys.”
58
WHEN CASEY emerged from the courthouse into a light drizzle, the mob of reporters shrieked and screamed their questions at her. In the frenzy, she made out Dwayne Hubbard’s name over and over, something about befriending a killer. Marty helped fight them back and packed her into his Volvo coupe. Several camera lenses bumped against the window, and by the time Marty made it around to the driver’s side, his glasses sat crooked on his face.
“They’re insane,” Casey said.
Marty started his car and blared the horn, backing slowly out of their spot.
“You’re surprised?” Marty asked, glancing over.
“It was an arraignment,” Casey said. “Not a hanging.”
“Dwayne killed her,” Marty said.
“It was twenty years ago,” Casey said, brushing a strand of hair behind her ear.
“Not Cassandra Thornton,” Marty said. “The fiancée. The girl from the press conference. They found her butchered, her eyes gouged out. That’s what they were saying.”
Casey stared at him as they accelerated down the street, leaving the swarm behind, the knot in her stomach tightening. “I heard the butcher part, not the fiancée. You’re not sure?”
Marty fished the cell phone out of his pocket as he turned for the Holiday Inn.
“I know a cop,” he said, opening the phone with one hand and hitting a speed dial key.
“Clarence? It’s me, Marty. Is it true the Hubbard guy killed his fiancée?”
Casey watched Marty’s face tighten.
“No shit,” Marty said into the phone. “That’s what I thought. It was? Okay. Thanks.”
Marty snapped the phone shut and nodded. “He did it. And there’s no sign of him anywhere. Evidently, she took about eight thousand dollars out of the bank yesterday afternoon. Told people it was for their honeymoon. She was taking him on a cruise. First class. Nice guy, huh?”
“I don’t believe it,” Casey said, scowling. “Take me. Show me.”
“I can’t-”
/> “You’re the one with connections, Marty,” Casey said. “That’s all I’ve heard since I got here.”
Marty looked hurt, but he opened his phone and dialed, then browbeat his cop friend, Clarence, with a ferocity that surprised Casey and made her think Marty might be a good lawyer after all, especially when the cop gave in.
“Not bad, right?” Marty said, flashing an eager look and spinning the wheel to make a U-turn.
Casey said nothing as they passed the prison and turned down into a side street of broken and rotting homes, their lines sagging like the faces of old people, their windows jagged like broken teeth.
“I don’t see the tape,” Casey said as Marty pulled over onto a crumbling curb.
“We can’t go in the front,” Marty said, climbing out and heading off between two dilapidated houses.
Casey hustled to keep up, stepping over piles of dog crap that lay in the grit amid crushed empty cans of malt liquor and shattered beer bottles. Marty forced open a bent and rusty gate. They passed by an abandoned aboveground pool, its sides bowed and its seams cracked with rust. The fence had been trampled into the weeds where they made their crossing into another neglected yard and under some yellow tape.
A uniformed cop appeared in the back door and waved frantically for them to hurry. They stepped into a rancid back room where unwashed laundry lay in a pile on the filthy linoleum.
“In there,” the cop said, stepping through the kitchen, over an upside-down saucepan and pointing down a hallway.
The cop looked at his watch, then at Marty, and said, “Five minutes.”
He disappeared and they heard the front door open and close.
Marty looked at Casey, his face losing color. “You don’t have to do this, you know.”
Casey shook her head, pushing past him, aware of the handprints on the faded refrigerator, the dirty dishes on the table, and an open can of something on the counter growing a beard of green mold. The scarlet shag rug in the hallway had been trampled flat down the middle long ago. Casey passed a dirty bathroom, its mirror broken and decked out with racing oil stickers.
Sheets from the bed had been stripped for evidence, leaving the mattress naked and bloodstained. The spray of blood on the pink walls could have been artwork, color coordinated to match the long shag rug, and in a way, it was. On each wall stared an unblinking eye, Dwayne Hubbard’s signature.
59
CASEY LEFT through the back and staggered across the lawn. She climbed into Marty’s car and rode in silence, staring straight ahead without saying a word. She made it to the streetlight just before her hotel, then her nerve gave out, and she dropped her face into her hands.
“Hey,” Marty said, patting her shoulder as he stepped on the gas. “This isn’t your fault. Oh, boy. There’s more of them outside the hotel.”
“Will you go in and get my things for me?” Casey asked without removing her face from her hands.
“Sure. I can go around to the back and they won’t see you.”
Casey fished the key out of her purse and handed it to him without looking. “Thanks, Marty. Two-sixteen.”
Marty got out and Casey breathed deep, thinking back to the other disasters of her past, including her marriage, and wondering if it was something about her or just bad luck. She could still see her mother wiping the flour from a pie crust on her apron and bending over to look at a wasp sting on Casey’s cheek, telling her that she just looked for trouble. Casey remembered the words hurting more than the sting. And even though Casey didn’t feel that way about herself, the echo of her mother’s words had never found rest inside Casey’s mind.
She shook her head and pounded a fist on the dashboard. She didn’t look for trouble. Trouble found her. She never looked for it. Never.
Marty rejoined her, tossing her bags into the backseat and sliding in behind the wheel.
“Where to?” he asked. “There’s a couple nice places in Skaneateles, away from the mobs.”
“Skaneateles?” Casey said. “No. Just take me to the airport, Marty.”
Marty’s face dropped. “The-you’re not going to just run from this?”
“Why?”
Marty’s face colored. “They’ll keep saying things.”
“Who cares?” Casey said, weary from it all.
“Your reputation,” Marty said. “Your… image.”
“Image. Right,” Casey said, directing her eyes straight ahead. “Airport.”
Marty’s phone rang and he answered it with one hand still on the wheel. “Uncle Christopher? Yes. I am.”
Casey could hear the punctuated sounds of Marty’s uncle, yelling on the other end of the line. Marty rolled his lips inward and clamped down until the shouting ended.
“I’m going to the airport,” Marty said quietly, “then I’ll come get them.”
Shouting erupted again.
“I understand,” Marty said, his face pale. “No, don’t do that. I’ll come right now.”
Marty hung up the phone and glanced at Casey. “Can you give me ten minutes?”
Casey held up a finger and called her travel agent in Dallas to book the next flight out.
“My flight’s not until 8:40,” Casey said, hanging up. “We should be fine, right? To stop?”
“Yes,” Marty said, his face expressionless and staring straight ahead.
Casey rode for a minute, watching the faded landmarks as Marty made a series of turns that took them back toward the center of town.
“So you want to tell me?” Casey asked.
Marty took a deep breath and let it out slow. “That was my uncle.”
“I figured,” Casey said, “and he’s not happy that you’re helping me.”
“He told me I couldn’t,” Marty said. “Like he was pulling some lever.”
“He is your boss.”
“I’m a lawyer,” Marty said. “I can hang my own shingle just like anyone else.”
“You going to quit?”
“No,” Marty said. “He fired me. He gave me ten minutes to get my things or he said I’d find them in a box on the sidewalk.”
Casey paused, then said, “Sorry.”
Marty slowly nodded his head, swerved to the side of the road, and threw open the car door. He removed his glasses and began cleaning them furiously on his shirttail before he leaned out and retched, spilling a stream of vomit onto the edge of the road. When he leaned back into the car and replaced his glasses, he wiped the corner of his mouth on the back of a wrist and apologized to her.
“It’s okay,” she said as they pulled back out onto the road.
Casey sat in the car in front of the Barrone law offices while Marty ran in. When he came out, he carried two boxes, both of which he dumped into the trunk.
“That’s a lot of stuff,” Casey said.
“Yeah, well,” Marty said, starting the engine and pulling away from the curb fast enough to swerve into the oncoming lane and set off a series of horn blasts, “I was starting a novel.”
Despite Casey’s pleas, Marty insisted on staying with her as she worked her way though the check-in process at the airport, waiting patiently beside her while the TSA agents went through her luggage. Upstairs, security had only one line going, and it snaked through the terminal all the way to the mouth of the walk bridge that led to the parking garage. Casey looked at her watch, counted the people in front of her, and came up with an estimate of how long it would take to get through the line.
“Your ten minutes cost me,” she said. “They shut the doors, like, twenty minutes before the flight these days.”
“You’ll make it,” Marty said. “There’s only a couple gates. It’s not like Atlanta. It took me half an hour one time to get to my gate once I passed through security there.”
Casey nodded and moved slowly forward. Her phone vibrated and she saw another number she didn’t recognize. She powered it down and stuck it into her briefcase. Her voice mail had already been overloaded, some from concerned friends like Stacy and Sh
aron and José but mostly from reporters eager for a scoop. How they got Casey’s number she couldn’t imagine. She considered calling Stacy back, just to check in, but pushed the idea from her mind. She just needed to get home, to her own couch, with her own balcony overlooking the narrow Venetian canal. Maybe a longneck bottle of Budweiser in her hand.
She was next in line to have her ID checked when a stampede of travelers gushed through the double doors on the exit side of the glass partition. Marty finally said good-bye and that he’d call her as things progressed, but he remained standing off to the side, evidently intent on seeing her all the way in. Casey was loading her computer into a plastic tub when the profile of Jake Carlson’s face caught her eye.
“Jake,” she said, waving and patting the plastic divider. “Jake.”
60
JAKE POINTED at the cell phone he held, then at Casey, then waved for her to come back. She gathered her things, disrupting the flow of the line and apologizing as she worked her way against the flow and ducked under the elastic rail. Jake kissed her cheek and hugged her excitedly.
“Why didn’t you answer your phone?” Jake asked.
“Too much,” Casey said. “I shut it off.”
“Where were you going?”
“Home.”
“And leave this lovely little town?”
“I got your message,” she said. “I didn’t think you’d get back. I need to put some distance between me and that place. I can still smell the urine from the woman in my cell. I think it’s on my clothes.”
Jake sniffed. “No. Come on. You can’t go. See what I’ve got. It’s going to take some doing, but we’re going to tie Graham in so tight with these mafia thugs that he’ll be the front-page story. Believe it or not, the FBI has an active investigation going on the guy.”
“I’d believe anything,” she said.
