Mean Streak

by Carolyn Wheat

  “Cut the clichés, Mr. Rosenthal. What about it?”

  Howie drew himself up to his full height—two inches shorter than me—and filled his lungs with air. He was preparing for a speech; Rossi glanced at his watch and gave a small sigh of resignation. He saw his table at Armando’s disappearing before his hungry eyes.

  Rafael and I were about to unleash the second weapon in our meager arsenal: Howie had absolutely no sense of humor and was much given to pompous prosecutorial speeches.

  “Your Honor, the people have offered a very reasonable plea under the circumstances,” he began, “and we think—”

  “Counselor,” Judge Rossi cut in, “nine to eighteen will punish him just as effectively as ten to twenty, and we can get that today. We can get it in two minutes, can’t we, Ms. Jameson?”

  I nodded eagerly. “They don’t call me the fastest mouth in Brooklyn for nothing,” I tossed in. Howie glared at me; he’d lost the judge and he knew it. He could insist on ten to twenty and take the case to trial, but if he did, he’d be in Rossi’s black book for weeks to come. Maybe months; Armando’s had a way of running out of its most mouth-watering specials. If Rossi missed the osso bucco there was no telling how long he’d hold a grudge.

  I sailed back over to Rafael and put my mouth next to his ear. He smelled of sweat and fear.

  Good.

  “We got it,” I said. “And the only reason we’re getting nine to eighteen is that you gave the judge his only laugh of the day. Maybe the week. So my advice is to jump on this plea before he loses his sense of humor. You admit everything and you won’t do double digits.”

  He jumped on it. We were out of there by ten to one; Rossi made it to Armando’s and Rafael and I achieved a victory of sorts.

  As I left the courtroom, Murray Singer’s gravel voice echoed in my ear. “So then the rabbi said to the chorus girl …”

  I wondered when I’d start telling Borscht Belt jokes to court clerks.

  One of my very favorite things about Matt Riordan was his voice. It was as rich and dark as fine Belgian chocolate; it soared into various registers like a well-played bassoon; it was lithe and playful, like a sleek otter. And it was on my answering machine for the first time in two months.

  All he said was: Call me. Two words; no name, no phone number. I was supposed to recognize the voice and remember the number.

  What pissed me off was that of course I did. The voice sent a shiver of anticipation through me. Absence might not have made the heart grow fonder, but it had definitely enhanced the libido.

  As for the number, I recalled from memory not only his home number but his office number, his fax number, and his beeper number. This from a woman who has to look up her own mother’s—

  But would I call? That was the question.

  I looked at the phone. The phone looked back at me. Not good. Not good at all. The quintessential female situation: looking at a phone and thinking about Him.

  What did he want? Had he realized Taylor was too young for him? Had he too missed our Friday night dinners, each of us telling war stories and judge stories and swapping notes about our respective weeks in court? Did he want to know what I thought of the New York magazine article?

  There was only one way to find out. I picked up the phone and dialed quickly, before I had time to change my mind. On the first ring I hung up.

  If there’s one thing in this world I hate, it’s feeling like a teenager. I wasn’t crazy about it when I was a teenager, but in my forties I really thought I should be able to call a man on the phone without wondering if my voice would sound too eager.

  I dialed again and this time I stayed on the line until I heard that voice. “Riordan.”

  “Matt?” Why my voice rose inquiringly when the man had just said his name was beyond me. It’s the same reflex that makes you push the elevator button even when you’ve just seen the person next to you push it first.

  He didn’t make that mistake. “Cass,” he replied, filling the single syllable with a flood of warmth, as though hearing from me was a wonderful surprise.

  Terse. To the point. That was the best approach. “I got your message,” I said. “What do you want?”

  Was that terse or just rude? I opened my mouth to add something, anything, but I didn’t have a chance.

  “Would you be free for dinner?”

  “Tonight?”

  “It could be tonight,” he said. I had a mental picture of him consulting his Rolex. “Shall we say an hour from now, at Tre Scalini?”

  An hour. An hour to shower, do my hair, change into a silk blouse—and of course the one I wanted would need ironing, and were my black jeans back from the cleaners? And then there was the subway ride to Little Italy.

  “Make it two hours,” I said. He agreed.

  I was twenty minutes late. Not only were the jeans at the cleaners, so was the blouse. I tried on four others before I found one that picked up the teal in the embroidered vest that matched my favorite cloisonné earrings.

  Date behavior. I was exhibiting definite date behavior, something I hadn’t done with regard to Riordan in a long time.

  He was sitting at a quiet table in the corner, his face ruddy in the pink light of the tiny lamps on the rose-painted wall. Tre Scalini looked like the inside of an old-fashioned valentine, all lace and Victorian colors and dainty, delicate embellishments.

  “One thing about eating with you,” I said, sliding into the seat next to his, “you always know where to get the best clam sauce.”

  He laughed. It was an old joke between us, but he laughed anyway. “I guess when your clients are named Scaniello and Cretella, you tend to eat Italian.”

  “Good Italian,” I amended. I opened the menu, which was a huge hand-scripted parchment affair. My eyes bypassed the real food and went straight to the section headed Dolci. “Does this place still have tiramisu to die for?”

  He smiled. It was an intimate, amused smile such as a fond father might bestow on a precocious daughter. It took me back to the early days of our acquaintance, when he treated me precisely that way, even though he was only twelve years older than I. As a result, I’d tended to exaggerate the adolescent brashness, while he leaned heavily on the avuncular. We’d outgrown those roles over the years, but we’d returned to them now that things were once again awkward between us.

  It wasn’t until we had steaming plates of linguine alla vongole and an enormous insalata verde in front of us that he revealed the purpose of this meeting. I choked on a clam and had to be pounded on the back by an overenthusiastic waiter before I could speak.

  “You want me to what?”

  “You heard me. I want you to represent me. Nick Lazarus is going to have that indictment voted and filed any day now and I need—”

  “Riordan, you don’t need me. You need Alan Dershowitz. Maybe F. Lee—”

  “No, I don’t,” he cut in, an amused smile on his face. At least it was meant to be an amused smile; there was a strain around the edges that told me to stop kidding around. “I need you. I need you because you’re smart and tough. You don’t run away from a fight and you don’t think prosecutors walk on water.”

  For a wild moment, my heart filled with pride. The pride a daughter feels when Daddy praises her. I let myself slide into fairyland; I pictured myself standing before the federal bench, cross-examining witnesses with laserlike acuity, pleading before a jury with an eloquence that had Juror Number Four dabbing tears from her eyes. Saw myself hitting the big time at last, all thoughts erased of ending my days as a female Murray Singer.

  CHAPTER TWO

  I’d come prepared on some subconscious level for Matt to ask me to resume our relationship. I hadn’t come prepared for this. I went into stall mode, tap dancing until I thought my way clear.

  “I haven’t done much federal work,” I remarked, as if that were the biggest obstacle to my taking the case.

  He waved the objection away with a languid hand gesture; the red stone in his Fordham class ri
ng gleamed in the subdued light of the restaurant. “Courts are courts,” he said. “I can advise you on the more arcane aspects of federal procedure.”

  “You sure you don’t need someone with a name?” I parried. “Someone with clout,” I went on. “What about Litman? What about Slotnick?” I named the two most prominent, most aggressive Manhattan criminal lawyers I could think of.

  He’d begun shaking his head before the first name left my mouth. “No and no,” he said with a finality that had me wondering if he’d already asked and been turned down. “I need a woman, for openers.”

  A little warning bell went off in my head. He needed a woman. Why? Because asking a male peer to defend him would be tantamount to stepping down as king of the hill? Because he couldn’t let a male lawyer see him scared and vulnerable?

  If that was his reasoning, it was not a sound basis for an attorney-client relationship.

  He kept talking. “I need someone local. I need someone who doesn’t have a reputation as ‘the lawyer of last resort’—which is another way of saying ‘a lawyer who represents the guilty.’ I need—”

  “You need a woman?” I broke in. “Why?”

  “Because Davia Singer is the lead lawyer for the prosecution,” he replied. “She’s young, ambitious, a tiger on cross—and she looks great in a tailored black suit.”

  “Which is one thing I’ve never been known to wear,” I countered. “If you’re trying to answer femininity with femininity, I’m not your woman.”

  “Cass, I’m not asking you to be anything but yourself; I just don’t want to present the image of a big, tall man pushing Davia around the courtroom.”

  “Whereas if I push her around, the jury thinks it’s a fair catfight?” A nice double bind; if he said no, he’d be lying. If he said yes, he’d brand himself a sexist.

  This time the smile was genuinely amused. “You’ve got it.”

  I smiled back. His deep blue eyes connected with mine and a surge of sexual energy filled my body. God, he was good-looking, full of masculine power.

  I was glad I’d dressed. The silk felt sensual next to my skin, and I knew the teal blouse and brightly colored vest looked good on me. I rested my chin on my hands and gazed into his hypnotic eyes, pretending if only for a moment that the night might end in bed, that his manicured hands might unbutton my blouse and reach inside to unhook my Victoria’s Secret bra.

  It wasn’t going to happen. His eyes might have a spark of sex in them, but his words were all business.

  “Cass, Nick Lazarus would give his left nut to see me convicted and disbarred. He’s had a hard-on for me ever since my first Scaniello trial.” I had to smile; the phallic images only served to confirm my earlier notion that the bull elephant wasn’t about to ask a rival bull to stand up for him in court.

  I started a checklist in my head. One column was headed Take the Case; the other said Hell, no. I put a great big check mark in the Hell, no column; I didn’t want a client who’d hired me on the basis that I wasn’t a man.

  I spoke a truth I’d known for a long time, but had never said aloud, at least not to Matt. “Lawyers like you have a limited lifespan,” I remarked. “Like dancers.”

  I looked down at my plate, at the sea of virgin olive oil and the stray linguine strands and the one lone clam. I decided what the hell and stabbed the clam with a fork.

  “You had to know it would happen someday,” I pointed out. “You had to know the prosecutors couldn’t stand to lose all the time, that one day they’d come after you the same way they came after your clients. The question is, did you do anything that would give them the ammunition they need?”

  “You mean, did I sit around the Ravenite Social Club and discuss taking out a hostile witness?” he countered. His tanned face reddened as he spoke; the words collided with one another as they left his lips. “You mean, did I accept fees in cash handed to me on the street in a paper bag? Did I act as go-between in a drug deal?”

  “Look, Matt, everything you’ve just mentioned was done at one time or another by a lawyer who swore up and down he was just representing his clients,” I shot back. The one constant in our relationship was that I was determined not to be bullied. In the past, he’d always liked that about me; it was one reason he was considering putting his future in my hands. “I know you’re not dumb enough to do those things, but did you do anything that might have blurred the line between acting as counsel for Mob clients and getting on the payroll?”

  “I am not a Mafia lawyer,” he pronounced, as if speaking for the record. “I have represented some clients who’ve been accused of—”

  “Save it for the next time you’re on Charlie Rose,” I cut in. All thoughts of date behavior were forgotten. He’d come to me for some kind of truth, and he was going to get it, whether he liked it or not. “The last time out, Lazarus managed to get you bounced off a Frankie Cretella case on the grounds that you were, and I quote, ‘house counsel to organized crime.’ True or not, Judge Schansky bought it and the Second Circuit affirmed. That decision set the stage for this indictment; it served notice that you were no longer immune by virtue of having a law degree.”

  Matt reached for the after-dinner brandy he’d ordered. He lifted the snifter to his nose and swirled the liquid around. I could smell its potent aroma from my side of the table. He took a bigger sip than I would have. Then he took another.

  He’d had a Scotch in front of him when I’d arrived, and since I was late, I doubted it was his first. Together we’d finished a carafe of Chardonnay, with him drinking three glasses to my one. Now he was plowing through the brandy.

  The Matt Riordan I’d known had liked his liquor, but he’d always, always limited his intake. He was a man who needed to be in control the way other men need to surrender to the oblivion of intoxication. I’d never seen him drunk, never even seen him slightly tipsy.

  Until tonight. Tonight the spider veins in his nose stood out like a roadmap. Tonight the famous voice slurred ever so slightly. Tonight he was drinking more than the self-imposed limit he’d always so rigidly set for himself.

  “What have they got?” I asked, keeping my tone crisp and businesslike. I wanted to reach over and give his hand a reassuring squeeze, to stand up and knead his tense shoulders. To bring back the urbane, witty, controlled Matt Riordan I’d known, and banish this worried shell of a man.

  “They say I bribed a court clerk, bought grand jury minutes.”

  “What’s bribery worth in the federal system?” I asked, keeping my tone professionally detached.

  “Fifteen years max,” he replied. “That’s the going rate for bribery. Of course, I doubt the judge would send me away for that long, but if I lose this case, I’m ruined even if I never see the inside of a jail cell.”

  I nodded. That was a given in a case involving a lawyer; a felony conviction would lose him his license, and the notoriety might lose him his clientele no matter how the case came out.

  “And, in case you were wondering,” he said with a sarcastic edge to his voice, “I did not put money in Paul Corcoran’s pocket in return for the grand jury minutes of Nunzie Aiello.”

  He said it crisply, decisively, unambiguously. I put a mental check mark in the column headed Take the Case.

  “Nunzie,” I mused aloud. “He’s the guy who—”

  “Please, Cass,” Riordan said, holding up a restraining hand, “let me tell this in my own way.”

  I nodded; interrupting people is one of my besetting sins. It’s just one more example of my resistance to the concept of patience.

  “Nunzie was a low-level Mob guy,” Riordan explained. “He pretty much ran errands and talked tough. There were rumors he was involved in street drugs, which Frankie Cretella hates like poison. But nothing was ever proved.”

  I ran the risk of Matt’s displeasure by saying, “I never believed that crap about the Mafia being down on drugs. It always struck me as sentimental nonsense.”

  “It isn’t sentiment,” Matt disputed. “It
’s self-preservation. Guys could do serious time for drug-selling, and a guy facing serious time could decide to cut a deal and sell out the bigger fish. So the big fish made a hard-and-fast rule: Deal drugs and you’re dead. They didn’t want to risk going down because of something they couldn’t control.”

  “And this Nunzie broke the rules?”

  “So I heard,” Riordan replied. “But that’s another story. He got caught up in Frankie Cretella’s garment union case; Lazarus charged him with being the one who threatened Lou Berger with a strike that would cripple his business. I represented Nunzie on that case.”

  He paused. I decided a question wouldn’t be out of order. “As I recall, Cretella himself wasn’t charged with anything.”

  Matt shook his head. He signaled the waiter for another brandy, making a little circle with his finger to indicate the need for another round. In my case, that meant a refill of insipid coffee. I schooled my face to show nothing; this wasn’t the time for a temperance lecture.

  “Lazarus wanted Frankie in the worst way, but he just didn’t have the evidence. The only one Berger could identify was Nunzie. One day Nunzie hands me an airline ticket and a hotel receipt that put him in Barbados on the day Berger said he was threatened. I presented the evidence to the jury, but they convicted Nunzie anyway.” Riordan’s face was troubled; I could see why the conviction bothered him. If a jury was prepared to discount such seemingly strong evidence of an alibi, it meant they believed it was a fake. Riordan’s reputation as a miracle worker was catching up with him; people were beginning to wonder what was really inside the magician’s hat.

  “Did you check this alibi out?” I asked. “Did you call the hotel employees to back up Nunzie’s story? Did you—”

  “Cass, I took what appeared to be genuine documents from my client’s hands and I entered them into evidence. It was for the jury to decide whether—”

  “But you had your doubts,” I persisted. “It’s obvious from the way you’re talking now—you didn’t believe Nunzie’s alibi, but you presented it to the jury, anyway.” This called for two check marks in the Hell, no column. At least.