36
YOU CAN LEARN EVERYTHING about a man by learning what he truly wants. I had seen the bricks and glass of Jimmy Moore's greatest ambitions; they dwarfed my own in grandeur and worth. I felt a strange, sad sympathy for Moore, with his grand dreams of healing and his own hopeless love for Veronica Ashland, both built on a foundation of tragedy, and truly I hoped his grand dreams could all come true. But not over the rotting carcass of my client.
"We need to talk," I said into the pay phone, taking no chances on a tap.
"My office, at five," said Slocum.
"Forget it," I said. "Last time I went there it made the front page of the Daily News."
"You got some heat, huh?"
"Like Las Vegas in August."
"Never been."
"Hot," I said. "Let's find a bar."
"Dublin Inn?"
"Too many ADAs. How about Chaucer's?"
"Fine," he said. "Make it later then. Eight o'clock. Something interesting?"
"You'll think so," I said, and I knew he would.
See, Prescott made a mistake, really. Had he treated me with the respect I craved, had he taken me to lunch as his guest at the Union League, at the Philadelphia Club, had he welcomed me with open arms into the fraternity of success, I might have sat quietly, willingly, and let Concannon eat whatever shit Prescott served him. But the bastard had threatened me, given me orders, turned me into his cabana boy, and that was his mistake. In the rush of my late-night prowlings with Jimmy Moore and his entourage, of my society functions, of my mentorship with Prescott, of my sexual obsession with Veronica, of my work and play with the Bishop brothers, of this new life that had seemingly been granted me, in the midst of it all I had lost my resentment for a while. But it was back, with a vengeance. It slipped over my shoulders like a favorite old sweater and it felt damn good. Even if the orders from my client prohibited me from actively engaging in the trial, even if my cut of the Saltz settlement and my deals with the Bishops and my directorship of CUP required my formal obeisance in court to Prescott, even if all that, my resentment still demanded I do something, anything, something, no matter the consequence. Concerning the mystery of who killed Bissonette, Jimmy Moore had said, "You're the man with the theories, you find out." So maybe I would.
What I had discovered from Raffaello was that Bissonette might have been killed because he was playing around with the wrong woman, so now all I had to do was find Bissonette's final fatal love. Lauren Amber Guthrie and her jangling gold bracelets? Maybe. Some other woman with a husband bent for revenge? Possibly. Or was it Chuckie Lamb after all, silencing the one witness who could connect him to everything? And what about the missing quarter of a million dollars, two-fifths of which was owed to Enrico Raffaello and the rest of the downtown boys? I wanted answers and quickly, before Eggert started nailing the shingles on the roof of the jail Prescott was building around Chester Concannon and before Raffaello started pressing me for information. Which is why I had called the man with the grand jury subpoenas, my old friend K. Lawrence Slocum, ADA.
Chaucer's was a friendly sort of neighborhood saloon with a famous shuffle bowling game, cheap paneling, stained-glass windows in the doors, and deep booths where groups of kids right out of college could sit and drink pitchers and gossip about other kids right out of college. When I first started going there it was filled with older, blue-collar types, with truck drivers, with lesbians who dressed like truck drivers, with college dropouts who ruefully discussed their dubious futures. But it no longer had that type of charm. Now the boys wore their baseball caps backwards, ponytails spilling out beneath the brims, the girls sheathed their long legs in black leotards, and they were all college graduates, discussing their dubious futures with pride. I still drank there, but now I felt too old to be a part and that was scary and sad both. I still remembered when it was a thrill just to be inside a bar, when the soft lighting and cigarette smoke and strangers on the stools whispered something so seductive I couldn't believe I could just walk in, sit down, and order a beer. But now I was one of the older and the sadder and the people slipping in were younger, gayer, more vibrant than I. Now I knew what the older people in the bars used to think of me because I knew what I thought of this new generation. I wished they all would just go home to their mamas.
Slocum and I were sitting in one of those deep booths toward the rear of the bar. The waitress had given us each a bottle of Rolling Rock and a glass and each of us had ignored the glass. I almost liked Slocum. He took it all very seriously, as one would want a public prosecutor to take it all very seriously, but he had a sense of humor, too. It was a weary sense of humor, that was the only type a prosecutor would ever allow himself, but even a weary sense of humor put him leagues ahead of the rest. I told him the whole story of my meeting with Raffaello, although I left out the part where he called his daughter a slut. I still remembered that Jasper and Dominic believed nothing was as important as keeping one's word, and though I almost liked Slocum, I wasn't willing to bet my life on whether or not he had a connection to Raffaello. Everyone else seemed to in this burg.
"He said it was a jealous husband?" asked Slocum.
"He didn't give me specifics."
"So right now it's just a mystery girl."
"Right," I said.
"And you want me to check it out?"
"Yes."
"To send out my detectives to find that girl?"
"That would be terrific."
"You want me to send out my detectives to find this mystery girl, the existence of whom was disclosed by the biggest criminal in the city, all in an effort to destroy my murder case against your client."
"Exactly."
"I don't think so."
"Larry, an innocent man is getting railroaded here."
"Or maybe Raffaello's lying. You ever consider that gangsters sometimes lie? Nothing happens in this town without him getting a cut. Maybe he was part of the whole thing and now he's throwing out false leads to take the heat off his compares."
"I don't believe that," I said. "Not for a minute. What I believe is that you've got the wrong guys facing death row and you don't want to admit it."
He shrugged, like he wasn't certain that I was wrong. "Maybe, Carl. It happens. But you're going to have to do your own investigating. How much you getting an hour for this case? No, don't tell me, it'll just make me ill. Earn your money, find the girl yourself." He rubbed his hand over his mouth and looked at me for a moment. "But maybe I can help."
I just stared at him and waited.
He leaned forward and lowered his voice. "All right, I'm going to tell you something. I'm telling you this because I think there's a chance, small, but a chance you may be right. But if it comes back in my face in some motion or in a newspaper article I'm going to be very disappointed, do you understand? And you don't want to disappoint me."
He paused and took a drink from his beer.
"When we showed you the physical evidence," he continued, "we didn't show you everything. There was a book."
"Shakespeare?" I asked.
"More like Ma Bell."
"A phone book?"
"A personal phone book."
"You withheld Bissonette's little black book?"
"Now don't get like that," he said, raising a hand in protest. "The office made a determination that it wasn't appropriate to release Bissonette's personal phone book, as it might tend to embarrass certain, how should I phrase this, certain well-known and highly placed women in the city. These women and their families have privacy rights. This wasn't like a hooker's book with the names of her johns. There were no crimes committed here."
"So there's this book." I pressed on.
"You want another beer?"
"Tell me about the book."
"I'd like another beer."
I raised my hand for the waitress like I was in grade school and ordered two more Rocks when she came. "All right," I said. "Tell me about the book."
"Well, this book has the
names of the usual suspects, a lot of women with reputations."
"Let me see the book."
"Are you listening to me, Carl? I said we're not disclosing the book. There are names in there that if you saw them your jaw would drop to your knees, world-famous singers, athletes, wives of heavy politicians."
"Like Councilman Fontelli's."
"This was his book. But there aren't just phone numbers there. He rated them, gave them stars, one to five, like a damn critic."
"Just like a baseball player to be obsessed with statistics. But that's good, then," I said. "We can use that book to find the girl he fell in love with. She was a five-star for sure."
"There's more than one five-star name."
"Just give me the five stars to check on, then."
"Some are just initials, some without numbers."
"Well, whoever this mystery woman is, it's someone in the book," I said. "A man falls in love, he puts the number in his book."
"You sound like you have a book of your own, Carl."
"More like a few paper slips with hand-scrawled numbers."
"You ever find a number you don't know whose it is?" asked Slocum, taking a long gulp from his beer, his eyes, behind his thick glasses, showing amusement.
"All the time."
"What do you do then?"
"I call it. 'Hello, anyone there single and under fifty-five?'"
"Oh man," he said. "I can't tell you how glad I am to be married."
The waitress came with two more Rolling Rocks, the green long-necked bottles fogged with cold. "Two more," I said.
"So this is what I'm offering here," said Slocum after the waitress left. "You give me the name of any women whose possible involvement you're investigating and I'll tell you if she's in the book and her rating. You can take it from there."
"Linda Marie Raffaello Fontelli."
"Three stars," he said. "I would have figured more with all that practice…"
"How about Lauren Amber Guthrie?" I said quickly.
"Where did that name come from?"
"I recognized her photograph in the love box."
"And you withheld relevant information about a homicide from me?" He shook his head at me sadly. "I'll let you know if she's in there tomorrow. Any others, you just give me a call."
"Tell me something else," I said. "Tell me what you know about a drug dealer named Norvel Goodwin."
He stared at me for a long moment, took a drink from his beer, and then stared at me some more. "What the hell are you into?" he asked finally.
I shrugged.
"Norvel Goodwin," he said, shaking his head. "One of the worst. We're onto him, but he's tough as hell and he's got a good lawyer. Bolignari."
"Tony Baloney," I said. "I have a case with him."
"Well, no matter how good a lawyer Tony is, it's only a matter of time. You don't step up like he is stepping up without paying for it. He was big in West Philly for a while and then dropped out of sight."
"When Jimmy Moore burned him out?" I asked.
He gave me another long look. "That's right. Now he's back. There's been a lot of violence in the East Kensington Badlands as he pushes his way into other people's territories. Fights over street corners. The five-year-old who got a bullet in her head last week, cover of all the papers?"
"That was terrible."
"That was Goodwin. A stray bullet from just another fight over another corner. But all of a sudden Goodwin has a lot of muscle and he's taking over a lot of territory. He's a stone-cold killer." He shook his head. "What the hell are you into now, Victor?"
I wouldn't have told him even if I knew.
37
JOSIAH BLAINE WAS A shriveled old scoundrel who huddled before his rolltop desk late into the night in his second-floor law office two blocks away from the courts in City Hall. I'm speaking now of a different time, when the law was a less pervasive thing and a ten-thousand-dollar case was as big as they came. Josiah Blaine practiced law at the turn of the century, representing envelope makers and hat blockers, collections mostly, first the dunning letters and then the confessions of judgment, attachments of the bank accounts, foreclosures, all for fifty or a hundred dollars, plus interest, plus costs. He owned a building at 6th and Green in the old Jewish section and once a month, on the first of the month exactly, except on Saturdays when it was impossible to get the Jews to pay him because they couldn't touch money on Shabbos, an excuse to get away with an extra day he would have told you if you asked him or even if you hadn't, he would roam the hallways, bent at the waist, banging on the doors and shouting at Mr. Pearlstein and Mrs. Himmelfarb and Mr. Carlkovsky, my great-grandfather Carlkovsky, to come up with the rent or face eviction the very next day. His wanderings through the hall were in the early mornings, too early for his tenants to escape his dreaded monthly knock on the door. And true to his word, those who were late would find the men in their apartments hauling out the mattresses, rolling up the rugs, tossing pots out the window to the street, where they clanged to great effect, clearing the place for a new extended family that had come up with the deposit and first month's rent.
When Josiah Blaine grew too arthritic to march through the hallways of his slum on Green Street, he sponsored Everett Cox to the bar so he would have someone to collect his rents on the first of the month and to file his confessions of judgment with the court. When Everett Cox, incapacitated by great quantities of alcohol, found himself unable to rise early enough to effectively collect the rents, he hired Samuel Amber as a clerk to do it for him, promising to study him in the law, a promise he was unable to fulfill because of the great quantities of alcohol. But Amber studied on his own and it was finally Josiah Blaine, now over eighty and rapidly losing his mind, who sponsored him before the bar. It was this Amber, of the Bryn Mawr Ambers, though in those early days they were not then of elegant Bryn Mawr but of Fishtown, it was Amber, Lauren Amber Guthrie's great-grandfather Amber, who began to add some semblance of modernity to the office's practice of law. He hired clerks to do the menial labor, he bought drinks for fellow lawyers in the bars surrounding City Hall, he obtained a position with the city from which he was able, for a small percentage to the city solicitor, to shuttle a nice piece of the city's legal work to the firm. Everett Cox insisted that the firm hire his son, Everett Jr., who embezzled city funds, a crime that it cost a considerable amount for Amber to buy his firm out of, but there was now enough work for more clerks and more lawyers and eventually more partners. By the time Josiah Blaine died, mad as a hatter, threatening his nurses with eviction, the offices had moved to the Fidelity Building, a corner suite, and there were eight names on the door.
In the firm's offices now there was a painting, on the frame of which a brass nameplate read JOSIAH BLAINE, OUNDER. The face in the painting was noble, blue eyed, a ferocious moustache like the elder Holmes, a fine head of hair. It was a face of solidity, of propriety, a founder's face, but it was not the face of Josiah Blaine. Lauren Amber had told me the truth one late night as we lay together in my bed. Her great-grandfather had found the painting among the bric-a-brac of an estate he was administering and thought it projected the proper image.
On an afternoon when our trial was recessed due to a pressing engagement Judge Gimbel had with his dentist, I was sitting in a tapestried wing chair directly under that very painting of Josiah Blaine. The offices of Blaine, Cox, Amber and Cox were not in One Liberty Place but in one of the older, less obtrusive buildings in the city. Blaine, Cox was one of Philadelphia's older, less obtrusive law firms, with well-monied clients and estate lawyers managing the wealth of the city's grandest grandes dames. The firm's two hundred lawyers practiced respectfully, discreet litigation, sensible corporate work. The bankruptcy department was exiled to a lower floor so as not to make the corporate types nervous. There was something so solid in the dark wood paneling, something so white-shoed and blue-blooded, something so foreign to me that I felt as if the fake Josiah Blaine in the painting above my head was staring down
at me with those cold blue eyes, demanding my monthly rent, threatening me with eviction if I didn't come through.
"Mr. Guthrie will see you now, Mr. Carl," said the receptionist. "He's sending his secretary up to get you."
That was the way they did it in the big firms, they sent emissaries for the visitors to summon them into the meetings. I didn't like being summoned, but Guthrie had said he wanted to meet and I had some questions to ask my dear former partner, a cuckold prone to violent rages, questions about his wife, from whom he had separated, and about a man with whom she was cheating while they were still together, a man who now was dead. I was out to find a murderer, so with the afternoon free I had told Ellie to set up the meeting and she had.
When the emissary from on high came I recognized her.
"Hello, Carolyn," I said. She was a tall African-American, pretty, competent, and an awesome typist. I knew about the typing because she had been our secretary before Guthrie brought her to Blaine, Cox, along with the files he stole.
"It's good to see you, Mr. Carl," she said as she began to lead me through the wide hallways of her new firm.
"How are they treating you here?"
"They pay us for overtime."
"Terrific."
"And we work plenty of overtime."
I followed Carolyn through winding hallways of wood and secretaries, remarkably busy for seven in the evening. When Carolyn worked for us she was always out the door at 4:58 on the nose. "I have to catch the train," she'd say, "or there's nothing else to get me home at a reasonable hour." Now, getting paid for overtime, she seemed to have no trouble catching the later West Trenton Local. It's funny what a little thing like time-and-a-half will do to a train schedule.
"Guthrie, you bastard," I said after Carolyn had led me into his office.
"You look like crap," he said.
"Thank you."
"Hey, what are friends for? Sit down, Vic. So this is your first time in my new digs, right? What do you think?"
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