“But the more I thought about it, the more I realized anyone who knew the squad would know that. Then I realized this cop wouldn’t just be an old pal of Stan’s—he’d be an old friend of your husband’s, too. You knew him, you’d had him over to your house for a party to celebrate his promotion to OCCB. So it was no problem to use his name to lure Stan to the plaza that night.”
There was still no spark of comprehension in her face, but at least she’d stopped fussing with the posters.
“As for Riordan,” I continued, “he was a little harder. But it was at the same party that Eddie bragged about taping his Psych Services interview. You knew he’d probably worn a wire when he spilled his guts to Nick Lazarus, and you knew he’d keep the tapes as insurance. So when you let Riordan think you had the tapes Eddie made, you were acting on what you knew about Eddie.”
I cleared my throat. “And you were acting on what you’d read about Matt. You knew he’d do anything to destroy Lazarus, and you knew he’d do anything to get those tapes.”
Still no response. Her eyes seemed to drift away as she listened to me. “The guy I married was a really good person,” she said at last. “He was a good cop and a good guy. And then he met Eddie.”
In her mouth, the name was a curse. “He met Eddie,” she went on, “and he became somebody I didn’t know anymore, somebody I didn’t like very much.”
She pulled herself up and faced me, her eyes burning with a need to convince me of something. “They killed him,” she said. “The goddamn squad killed my Dwight, turned him into someone else. Eddie killed him with his macho bullshit and his dirty money. Stan killed him with his indifference. Lazarus and Singer killed him with their ambition. You and Matt Riordan killed him with your lousy subpoena. So when it came time for me to do what I had to do, I wanted all of you to suffer. I wanted all of you to be suspected.”
“But Riordan and I were going to destroy Eddie,” I pointed out. “He wasn’t going to get away with it, not really.”
“He was going to be alive, wasn’t he?” she replied. “That’s getting away with it from where I sit. Because Dwight’s dead, and I couldn’t stand to live one more day in a world where Dwight was dead and Eddie was alive.”
Her voice shook slightly, whether from grief or rage I couldn’t be sure. She clamped her jaw shut, but not before I realized she was very close to falling completely apart.
“It must really have torn you up to hear Nick Lazarus trying to put the blame on Dwight for everything Eddie did,” I said.
“Don’t patronize me, okay?” Annie said. The tears that had been lurking in her eyes dried up; her voice was firm and hard and angry. “Lazarus was a complete shit, but none of the rest of you were any better. All any of you cared about was your goddamned egos. Eddie was going to get away with it one more time, because he had balls and my Dwight had too much of a conscience.”
“So you took the gun Dwight used to kill TJ and you brought it to the plaza to kill Eddie Fitz,” I said. “Only you didn’t realize it was the same gun, did you? You didn’t realize Dwight killed himself because he was worried about being indicted for murder, not just corruption. Corruption he probably could have lived with, but he didn’t want the world to know Eddie had conned him into murder.”
“Stan should have stopped it,” she said in a low voice. “He was older, he was a guy Dwight could have looked up to, would have listened to. Only Stan was too busy being cynical. He could have stopped Eddie, or at least helped Dwight to see Eddie for what he really was. But he didn’t care enough. He let Dwight kill that drug dealer.”
“I hate to sound harsh,” I said, “but all Dwight had to do was say no. You can blame everyone else in the world if you want to, but the truth is, nobody forced Dwight to rip off drug dealers or to murder TJ. He could have said no.”
“You don’t understand,” she cried. “You don’t know what it’s like for a man like Dwight. How he always had to prove himself, how he was never sure of who he really was. The other guys laughed at him, made him feel like a wimp. He needed to show them. Oh, God,” she said. “If only I’d been able to convince him to move away, to leave the Department.”
“Is that what you really wanted?” I prodded. “Or did you want Dwight to show Eddie what a big man he could be? Did you maybe let Dwight see that if he left the Department, it would be because he wasn’t man enough to handle it?”
“I never said that,” she replied. “I never in our whole marriage said a thing like that.”
“Maybe you never said it sober,” I shot back, the thought just occurring to me, “but how about when you were drinking?”
“If I said it then, I didn’t mean it,” Annie said, her tone sullen.
“Do you think Dwight could make that distinction?” I asked. “You know what they say about in vino, veritas.”
“Which is total bullshit,” Annie argued. “Any ex-drunk knows that. People say a lot of crazy things when they’re drinking; it doesn’t make it the truth.”
“I repeat, did Dwight know that? Or did he think the only way to get your respect was to be like Eddie?”
“Why are you asking me these things? Why do you want to make it my fault that Dwight did what Eddie wanted him to do?”
That was one hell of a good question, and one for which I had no good answer.
Or did I? Wasn’t I really seeking absolution for the crime of hitting Dwight with the subpoena? It had been no more than a fishing expedition but it literally scared the life out of him. I’d known Dwight wouldn’t break, wouldn’t testify against Eddie when push came to shove. I hadn’t known why. I hadn’t known it was because Dwight had committed a murder for Eddie, but I did know the subpoena was just a scare tactic. And I served it, anyway. I served it anyway, and it ended up in Dwight Straub’s car, alongside his body.
I wanted that to be someone else’s fault.
“What happens now?” Annie asked. She pushed a strand of hair from her forehead and looked at me with the weary gaze you see in Walker Evans photographs. Her thin arms, drawn face, shapeless print dress, all added to the illusion that she was a Dust Bowl wife worrying about how to feed the young’uns. “Who do you tell about this?”
“Warren Zebart, I guess. He’s the FBI agent who—”
“I know who he is, for God’s sake,” Annie cut in. She took a deep breath, let it out in a long sigh, and asked, “Do you have to tell him?”
I nodded. “You know I do.” I tried for a gentle tone, but no amount of gentleness would soften the facts.
She smiled a secret smile. “They’ll never find the gun,” she said in a childish voice. “I threw it in the river.”
I gave that assertion some thought, then shook my head. “No, you didn’t. Not that night, anyway.”
Her eyes widened. “Why do you say that?”
“Because no woman is going to walk to the East River in the middle of the night, throw a gun into the water, and walk back alone. Not at one in the morning. Whatever you did with that gun,” I finished, “it is not in the river.”
Her smile widened but held no amusement. “It’s in the water, though.”
In the water. We were standing on an island. The amount of water available for throwing guns into was—
Then I had it. Where else would a grieving widow get rid of the gun she’d used to kill her late husband’s best friend?
To the place where her husband had sat in his car, watched the sun come up over the bay, and shot himself in the head.
“You threw it off Orient Point,” I said.
She nodded.
“Zebart will have the area dragged,” I said. “He’ll find the gun.” I sounded more confident than I felt.
“I know,” she replied. “I suppose I’ve always known I wasn’t really going to get away with it. But I felt better as soon as Eddie was dead. I really did feel better. I stood there at the top of the courthouse steps and I looked at all that blood and Eddie’s brains splashed on the white stone wall, and I felt great.
I felt powerful. I felt like I could float right down without touching the steps with my feet. I felt alive for the first time since all the trouble began. Can you understand that?”
I nodded.
“You know what I hated most?” Annie went on. “That stupid nickname: Ike. That stupid fucking nickname.” She fixed me with her serious gray eyes. “My husband let another man tell him what his name was. Can you imagine anything more pathetic? He let another man give him his name.”
Fat Jack sat in the last booth, a doll-sized cup of espresso in front of him. The cup was flanked by a bottle of sambuca capped with an aluminum nozzle. He nodded me into the booth with the air of a cardinal granting permission to approach. Or perhaps it was the late Don Scaniello the ex-bail bondsman was imitating.
I slid into the red leather banquette and signaled the waiter for my own demitasse. I’d have preferred cappuccino, but somehow it seemed important to match the fat man drink for drink, to spice my coffee with the licorice-flavored liqueur and sip the way they did in the old country. Neither of us was Italian, but the atmosphere of Forlini’s settled over us and added a layer of intricate Machiavellian nuance to our every gesture, our every word.
“Tell me again why you wouldn’t testify,” I said after Fat Jack had poured a shot into my cup. I lifted it to my lips; the flavors of strong coffee and sambuca lingered on my lips like a Judas kiss. I was here to get the truth about Riordan, and I’d known from the minute I walked in the door it wasn’t a truth I was going to like.
“I told you,” the fat man replied in a rasping voice. “I told you you wouldn’t like what I’d have to say.”
“And then you told me Riordan ordered you to pay off Eddie Fitz,” I reminded him. “But that was a lie, wasn’t it? Riordan’s not stupid enough to fall for a scam like Eddie’s; he never gave you money to pay Eddie off.”
“So why did I pay him, then?” Fat Jack asked. His pudgy fingers enclosed the tiny china cup. The huge restaurant was all but empty; the legal lunch crowd was back in court.
“I’m not sure you did,” I replied. “I know why you said you did, though. Because you and Eddie were in it from the start. You didn’t jump over to Lazarus’ side because you found that internal memo—you were on Eddie’s team the whole time. The memo was just a pretext, a cover for the real truth.”
“And just what is that real truth?”
I sat back in the booth, letting the quiet of the place settle over me, calming my nerves.
“Everyone kept saying how remarkable it was that Eddie knew when to wear a wire and when to leave it off,” I pointed out. “Lazarus said it, Singer said it, and so did the judge—hell, Eddie himself said it. But what if it wasn’t instinct? What if he knew damned well when to leave the wire off because he knew for a fact he’d be searched that night?”
“How would he know that, Ms. Jameson?” Fat Jack made a good straight man. For a moment I wondered whether his willingness to let me spin my little yarn meant that I was completely wrong in my conclusions. I decided there was only one way to find out, and plunged ahead.
“Because the person responsible for conducting the search made a practice of telling him in advance,” I said. “You and Eddie talked before every meeting. You told him whether or not you were going to search him, and he wore a wire or not, depending on what you said.”
“Why would I do that?” The fat man’s hands were still. He waited with the patience of a Buddha, his face expressionless. He was a tough room; I began for the first time to doubt the reasonableness of my own conclusions. “For that matter,” he went on, “why would Eddie do that?”
That question I had an answer for. “Eddie knew his days as king of the street were numbered,” I theorized. “He knew the squad was being investigated, and he knew it was only a matter of time before someone cracked and the whole bunch of them went down. He decided he wasn’t going down—that his only option was to beat the other guys to the prosecutor’s office and turn state’s evidence. That’s why he sucked up to Lazarus during the commission hearings, why he dared Lazarus to go after lawyers and judges. He saw himself as the star witness, bringing down other guys instead of being marched out of some precinct with his jacket over his head. He decided to go from corrupt cop to Hero Cop—but a hero needs an enemy. A hero needs to put himself in danger. So you played the heavy.” A flicker lit the gray eyes in the piggish face. “Pardon the pun,” I said without a smile.
“Guys like Lazarus,” Fat Jack said, “always fall in love with cops. See, that’s the thing I always liked about Matty. He could stand toe-to-toe with the kneecappers and he never flinched. He never stood in awe of those fuckers, either—never hero-worshipped bastards like Frankie C. or cops like Eddie. Matty was a street fighter in a three-piece suit; he wasn’t awed by tough guys. But a guy like Lazarus—Nicky creamed his pants whenever Eddie told a war story. He loved it when Eddie went out wired, put his life on the line to make his case. He ate it up the night Paulie and I held the gun to Eddie’s throat. Eddie was golden from then on.”
“And that was the point,” I said. “Eddie had a closetful of skeletons, and he knew the only way to insure that Lazarus wouldn’t throw him to the wolves when he found out about those skeletons was to let Lazarus think he was risking his life to make the case against Riordan. That way Lazarus would always owe Eddie, would think twice about holding him responsible for all the stuff he did on the street.”
“It worked, didn’t it?” Jack asked.
“You explained why Eddie did it,” I said, “but you haven’t told me yet why you went along with it.”
“Why don’t you guess?” my companion retorted with a sneer.
“All right,” I replied. This was the part I was least certain about—and the part I wanted least to discuss and to face. But I’d promised myself the full truth. I’d stood in judgment on Annie Cohagan Straub for refusing to face the full truth about the man she’d loved, and I was damned if I was going to keep on doing the same thing.
“It all starts with Nunzie Aiello,” I said. My espresso was cold; I took a sip anyway.
“What do you know about Nunzie?”
“I know Frankie Cretella didn’t kill him,” I responded. “I know the person who did went to a lot of trouble to make it look like a mob hit, a replica of the Scaniello murder.”
“Nunzie’s old business,” the fat man pronounced.
“Maybe,” I agreed. “But you drew the line at murder, didn’t you? You’d fetched and carried for Matt Riordan for thirty years, but you drew the line at murder.”
I wasn’t certain exactly when I’d come to believe that my ex-lover and ex-client had killed Nunzie, but I knew that Taylor’s story of how he’d been late to his own birthday party had something to do with it. Nunzie had gone missing in October, just about the time Matt would have been celebrating. And Frankie C. was on record as telling the world he wasn’t going to rescue his lawyer from Nunzie’s treachery.
“I couldn’t see ratting him out for it, though,” the bail bondsman said. “That I couldn’t see. But when Eddie Fitz came along with his little scam, I thought, what the hell? Matty deserves some punishment for what he did to Nunzie. Why not help Lazarus nail him for bribery, when the God’s honest truth is, he’s bribed in his time. Which I didn’t care much about then or now, but whacking Nunzie—the guy was an inoffensive little schnook who was trying to save his own ass. He didn’t deserve to wind up as worm food in the trunk of a car.”
“You never asked.”
This was true. I had never asked. I’d plunged into Riordan’s defense on the bribery case without bothering to ascertain whether he had, in fact, killed Nunzie Aiello. I’d accepted his explanation that the whole idea of his being responsible for Nunzie was a delusion on the part of Nick Lazarus, an obsession of a demented FBI agent.
I had never asked. But this didn’t mean he’d had no obligation to tell.
I said as much as I stood in the parlor of Riordan’s office suite. I stood because I wasn�
��t sure I wanted to sit, wasn’t sure I wanted to share an intimate chat and a drink with a man I now knew to be a stone killer.
I now knew. I now knew what I hadn’t wanted to know.
From the beginning, I’d known what Matt was. I’d hopped on for the ride anyway, refusing to let his reputation deter me from pursuing whatever it was we had together.
Why?
Because I’d always loved roller coasters.
“How?” I asked. I was keeping my words to a bare minimum, as though by opening my mouth to speak I ran the risk of filling my lungs with poisoned air.
“Will you please sit?” Riordan’s voice carried an edge of annoyance. “I hate the way you’re standing there like the Angel of Judgment.”
The exotic blooms in the blown-glass vase were shriveling. There were little brown edges on the pale-peach lilies. In the old days, Matt changed the flowers every other day, throwing out the whole bouquet and starting fresh. In the old days, there were three or four law students doing research in the library, two receptionists covering the phone, Kurt Hallengren handling the preliminary court appearances. Now it was just Matt and the decaying flowers.
His career would never recover from the body blows struck by Nick Lazarus. The people who wanted Matt to represent them wanted a winner, and Matt was beginning to carry the smell of defeat, even if he had beaten the rap.
He’d been right; winning wasn’t enough. He’d won the verdict, but he’d lost in the long run.
“How?” I said again, as I slid into the armchair beside the drop-leaf table.
“Let me give you a drink,” Matt said. He rose and went to the bar. “You always say it’s too hot to drink Scotch in summer, but you’ll like this.”
He brought back a huge blown glass with a half-inch of amber liquid inside. I sipped and let the warmth surge through me like a jolt of electricity. “Nice,” I said. “Thanks.”
I was drinking with a killer. A killer who wore an Armani suit and tasseled Gucci loafers with black silk socks that covered his calf.
Mean Streak Page 22
