“What about Conroy? Did he gamble? Did he lose?”
“You’re kidding, right? Mark Conroy is so far from being a gambler that… Well, he’s basically pretty conservative. He was always saying, ‘The ducks have to be in a row.’ He drove me crazy with that.” She shook her head emphatically. “No, Mark did not gamble.”
“And you weren’t recognized on that trip to Las Ve-gas?”
“Obviously we were together—went to dinner, shows, and so on. But Mark is not the kind who is what you’d call demonstrative in public. We didn’t hold hands. He didn’t put his arm around me. He never did that out in public. That’s one of the things that made things hard. A couple of times we met people from the convention, they even sat down with us. He introduced me as Sergeant Tucker, ‘our top computer programmer.’ Everything was cool. Nobody cared. Frankly, I don’t think they would have cared if we’d been sleeping together. They must have suspected, some of them anyway. For them, I mean, basically it was, like, who cared? Mark got too nervous about shit like that.”
Then I asked in an easy, conversational tone, “Did Tim-merman contact you first, or did you contact him?”
“Timmerman,” she answered. “He’s a neat guy on the phone. He—”
She stopped. Full stop. She pulled herself up in her chair and looked at me, at first puzzled, then hostile.
“I’m not supposed to talk about that,” she said.
“Why not?” Friendly, easygoing. “You’ll have to talk about it eventually. I thought we could discuss it sort of informally right now when you’re not under oath. Just some details. For instance, have you met Timmerman yet, or has it all been over the telephone?”
She got to her feet.
“You ought to know all about that. That same afternoon you followed me at school I’ll bet you were trying to track him down, weren’t you?”
I didn’t move.
“What did he promise you, Mary Margaret? A job with the city when you finished law school?”
“Out!”
“You really want me to go? I think it’s in your interest to talk to me.”
“We’re through talking right now. Just get out.”
Reluctantly, I rose to my feet, still arguing in the voice of sweet reason. It did no good whatever.
“Out!” she screamed.
There was no point in trying to hold out against that. I turned and started out of the kitchen, heading for the front door. But I did have one parting shot left to fire.
“Mary Margaret,” I said, turning at the door, “I hope you remembered to get a receipt from those guys in the Mayor’s Squad for all that money. Otherwise, you know, you could wind up taking the rap for all this. I hope you realize that.”
The look of sudden consternation on her face told me that my educated guess had hit the mark, as I’d intended.
“Any time you want to resume this conversation,” I said, “just let me know. You have my card. Just give me a call. See you, Mary Margaret. Thanks for your time.”
Although I made it to my car without looking back, I had the distinct feeling she was standing there in the doorway, watching me go. Still, I resisted the impulse even to glance over my shoulder as I started the car, slipped it into drive, and pulled away from the bungalow on Eastburn.
It was only then, a block away and completely out of sight, that I dared to take the thing out of my inside coat pocket, detach a tiny microphone from by buttonhole, and put the entire apparatus down on the seat beside me.
I’d asked Mark Conroy if I might borrow his tape recorder when I parted company with him the night before. He had shown me how it worked, even rummaged around in the glove compartment of his Cadillac and found a new cassette and the right sort of microphone to do the job I had in mind. He checked me a few times until I was pretty sure I could turn it on simply by touch. Then he wished me luck. I hoped that would be enough to get the interview with Mary Margaret Tucker down on tape. As it turned out, there was no difficulty at all.
I stopped at a convenience store in her neighborhood to make a telephone call. This one, like so many others in Detroit, had a protective wall of inch-thick, bulletproof plastic to shield the clerk in the very likely event of a visit by an armed robber.
I glanced around but saw no telephone.
“Got a pay phone?” I asked the clerk.
He pushed up close to the three holes that had been drilled in the plastic wall to ease communication. A young guy, in his twenties, he was dark complected and dark haired. He looked at me sharply and must have decided I was okay.
“It’s in the back,” he said, “against the wall.”
I know Bob Williams’s number by heart. He picked up on the first ring.
“It’s Charley,” I said. “You got a meeting tonight?”
“Sure we do,” he said. “But it’s a matinee. Three P.M., St. Jude’s basement. We’ll get you home in time for dinner.”
“I was thinking we might have dinner afterward, that is, if you don’t have anything planned.”
“Sounds good to me. Are you in special need?”
“Let’s just say I’ve got a few things I’d like to discuss.”
“I’m all ears. See you at three.”
I walked back to the glass booth where the clerk, still regarding me with some slight suspicion, sat on a high stool. I took him to be Chaldean, a Christian Arab. There were a lot of Chaldeans in Detroit, most from Lebanon, some from Syria and Iraq. I’d defended one of them on a murder charge five or six years ago. He’d shot a robber dead in his small grocery store in Dearborn; he probably wouldn’t have been charged, except that it turned out the robber had a replica gun, very realistic but made from plastic and inoperable, and the Free Press expressed editorial, outrage. I got him off without much trouble. He might not have had the problem at all if he’d been encased in bulletproof plastic the way this guy was.
I lingered at the booth and noticed a box of unfamiliar cigars among the cigarettes on display on his side of the wall. They were on the small side, a handy size for an occasional smoker like me.
“Are those pretty good?” I asked, pointing at the cigars.
“Very good,” he said. “From Lebanon. I smoke them myself.”
“Give me three of them, would you?”
They turned out to be a dollar apiece, pricey little devils, but they looked good. I shoved a five through the bank-teller slot and got back my change.
“The telephone used to be there.” He pointed to the wall behind me. “One night, late, one of them came in, just this one and me, and he tore the phone apart right in front of me.”
“Why did he do that?”
“He thought he’d get me to come out of here so he could rob me. He had a gun. I could tell. I just sat here and called the cops.”
“Did they catch him?” Stupid question.
“No, they came an hour later. I stayed open and waited for them. They said I did the right thing just to sit and watch him do this. ‘Better luck next time,?’ they said. What does that mean?” He shook his head angrily. “That’s crazy—‘next time.’ How could something so stupid happen two times?”
“I hope you’re right, friend. I hope you’re right.”
I gave him a wave and stepped outside. It was hard to live in a city with so much frustration and anger simmering away day after day—just simmering, though. Things hadn’t come to a boil since the ’67 riots. And for that, whether it pleased all the citizens of Detroit or not, they had the mayor to thank.
Then, as I took a moment to light one of the cigars, I happened to remember something—or rather, someone. It struck me that I knew an associate of the mayor’s from a long time back, one who knew him when old Ismail Carter chain-smoked short, slender stogies just like these. In the old days, he’d emptied many a City Council meeting with them, blowing smoke at the opposition. Representing the old Black Bottom, just east of downtown, he was an old-fashioned power broker, a fixer, the kind of pol who loved to wheel and deal almos
t as much as he loved dispensing largesse to his constituents. Everybody owed him. He liked it that way.
Though not one of his constituents, the mayor owed him, too. Ismail had taken the mayor-to-be under his wing from the moment he took his seat on the Council in 1968. He taught him how to operate, how to turn Detroit’s distress to his personal advantage. He saw in him one who just might grab what he never could—the crown and scepter, the kingship of Detroit. I wonder what Shakespeare could have done with these dramas of big-city politics, these tales of rebellious succession. They were not all that different from the material he had to work with in his own day. I tried to imagine John Henry and old Ismail blathering on in blank verse, but it was hard, damned difficult. Yet it was true that the two did communicate in a kind of gutter poetry. Ismail had taught it to his young protégé, persuaded him that if you wanted the people to vote for you, you had to talk to them in the kind of language they understood and spoke among themselves. You gotta walk the walk and talk the talk. That was how the term motherfucker became more or less common in serious political discussion, at least within the limits of the city of Detroit. And that was how, to simplify shamelessly, the mayor first got himself elected.
For a couple of years Ismail Carter was there at his right hand, the mayor’s trusted advisor. Yet poor old Ismail had been urban-renewed right out of the business. Black Bottom, most of it, was no more. Where once the frame houses and brick tenements stood, there were now rows of bright and shining high-rise apartment buildings, alternating with whole blocks of steel-and-glass boxes dubbed “townhomes” by the developer. They were occupied by Yuppies and Buppies who felt they owed nothing to any man, least of all to some aging reminder of the city’s past. He became a politician without a constituency, as much an anachronism in his own way as were my old pals in the Irish mafia who had formerly ruled Detroit. Ismail lost his seat on the City Council. It wasn’t long before he dropped out of sight completely.
But before he did, he and I met under rather strange circumstances. At least at first they seemed strange to me. He’d been hit with a civil rights suit by one Carol Johnson and that dated back a couple of years to when he still held his seat and kept an office in the city building. He showed me the papers he’d been served with, and maybe because I’d had my usual three or four martinis at lunch, I just didn’t get it. Why should Ismail Carter be the target of a discrimination suit? Why should he want me to defend him when every black lawyer in town was in his debt for favors and incidentals?
But then Ismail made it all clear to me in just a couple of words: “She’s white.”
Carol Johnson, a recent graduate of the University of Michigan in political science, who also took shorthand and typed ninety words per minute, applied for a job at his Council office. After displaying her credentials and skills, and following a brief, personal interview with Councilman Carter himself, she was told that others were applying for the job, and she would hear later if her application had been successful. She never did. Later she learned that the position had gone to a Melody Martin, a black woman, who had no college degree, took no shorthand, and could barely type. “Sweet little girl,” said Ismail of Ms. Martin. “She was my barber’s niece.” Although Ms. Johnson had no difficulty finding another job, she brooded upon this injustice, and as a second-year law student at George Washington University in Washington, D.C., she prepared and filed the complaint expertly with the Civil Rights Commission. Because this was back in the Seventies and was one of the first reverse discrimination suits ever brought, it got a lot of attention in newspapers all over the country, even a sound bite or two on national television. I think I tried it pretty well.
Ismail Carter himself gave me the handle I needed when, at our second meeting, he started to tell me what I didn’t want to hear, never wanted to hear from a client.
“Now, Charley Sloan,” he said to me, “I’m not one of these public servants who gets in a jam and has a sudden attack of amnesia. I’ll tell you right off I remember this girl, Johnson, very well, and if you want to know the God’s honest truth, I did discriminate against her.”
I tried to interrupt him. He poked that ever-present cigar at me and told me to shut up. He would have his say.
“Now, like I say, I did discriminate against her, but not for the reason that’s there in the complaint. It had nothin’ to do with color, or race, or any of that shit my people been puttin’ up with for more years than either of us can count. Fact is, I had a white woman work for me back in the Forties, during the war. She was a Communist and a real good liaison with the unions. She got married after three years, had a baby right away, and quit. Then, well, there was another white woman worked for me, but she just recently died.
“But nossir, it had nothing to do with race, me not hiring that girl. What it had to do with was that she was so damn ugly I didn’t want her there every day, lookin’ her in the face. Now, Charley Sloan, I don’t know how it is with you, though I did notice those young ladies out front in your office are awful easy on the eyes, but I’ll tell you how it is with me. See, when I go into the office every morning, it cheers me up to look at those pretty female faces, specially now I’m older. And just say I venture out for a bit of information has to be looked up in the files. ‘Oh, Mr. Carter, I’ll get that for you right away,’ and then she sashays off and hunkers down because what I need is down in the bottom drawer, and I take all this in, and that gives me a serious cheer-up, makes my old pecker tingle. But this young lady, Carol Johnson, she just never would make my pecker tingle. I swear, she got up in the morning and took ugly pills every day of her life.”
I remember asking him then if he had taken advantage of any of the young ladies who worked for him. That might indeed prove a problem. But he set me straight on that.
“I have never in my life taken advantage of any woman, never made an unwelcome advance in my life—though I admit, some women have taken advantage of me.”
With that to go on, I planned my strategy. I was never able to find the white woman who Ismail had employed during the war. She’d moved to Burbank, California, in 1951 with her husband and two children, and there I lost the trail. But old city records from that era confirmed that yes, she had been employed in the councilman’s office, and yes, she was Caucasian. Exhibit A.
But I got as many men as I could on the jury—white or black, it didn’t matter—because when I called Ismail Carter’s present and former employees to the stand, one after the other, to attest to his sterling character and indifference to color, it was a regular beauty parade there in the courtroom. The gentlemen of the jury not only enjoyed the show, they also got the point, especially when Carol Johnson came on the stand.
Perhaps Ismail had been unnecessarily cruel in his description of her. She wasn’t what I would have called ugly, but she was homely, rather, so gawky and plain that she would have passed any man unnoticed on the street. Or perhaps there was something ugly about her that came from inside. Her small blue eyes, sharp and vengeful, darted about the courtroom ceaselessly so that she seemed to be lying even when I knew she was telling the truth. The corners of her mouth turned down in an expression of disapproval whenever she happened not to be speaking in her shrill, grating voice. I had to admit to myself I wouldn’t have wanted her working in my office. The gentlemen of the jury must have admitted the same, and the ladies, too, for her suit was denied.
Of course, it helped that I got her to admit, reminding her she was under oath, that when she applied for the job in June, she had not informed Ismail Carter that she would be leaving to attend law school in Washington the following September. That more or less wrapped things up for Carol Johnson.
Ismail was delighted, of course, and paid my stiff fee cheerfully. Few do. Once out of trouble, they forget all too quickly who rescued them. And his last words to me were, “I owe you.”
Remembering all this on my drive back home puffing on one of my newly acquired cigars, I wondered why it had not come to mind earlier. All I c
an say is that booze does funny things to your brain. I was hitting it pretty hard in those days. There are some big blank spots in my past, territories that may be opened up to me suddenly, unexpectedly by some relevant reminder, like how the little cigars looked like the ones Ismail Carter used to smoke.
But now that I had remembered, now that I had my man, I wondered what he could do for me. He owed me. He could carry a message to the mayor. But just what would that message be?
13
There was the rest of the morning and the better part of an afternoon to kill before the AA meeting at St. Jude’s was to begin. I tried Sue on the telephone and all I got was her answering machine. Remembering the shape she was in the night before, I left a sympathetic message and asked her to give me a call when she came in. More than likely, she was down at Kerry County Police Headquarters going through the files on the three children who had been killed already. I hoped I was wrong about that. But if that’s where she was, there was no telling how long she’d be gone. Poor Sue.
I knew I had no intention of going into the office and looking once more at the Conroy file, or listening to the Mary Margaret Tucker tape, or doing anything more that day even remotely connected with the case. It had taken a while, but the horror of the night before had finally caught up with me. I kept flashing back to the gruesome images right out of some disgusting grade-B slasher movie. I kept seeing that ghastly wound in his middle, the intestines, that face clouded and sorrowful in death. I was exhausted, but I knew that sleep in such circumstances would be impossible. And so I did the only thing anyone could do in that situation. I put on a pot of coffee.
Defense lawyers are sheltered from the realities of death. I must have tried nearly a hundred cases of first-degree murder in the course of my career. Yet I’d never been right there at the scene of the crime, viewing the remains, looking over the cop’s shoulder, not until recently. Oh, I’d looked at forensic photographs often enough, tossed them aside, and then gone on to argue what I assured the judge and jury were the important issues in the case. Whatever I had said those issues were, I was wrong, lying, perhaps, if only to myself. What was important was the victim, the fact that a life had been taken, the even more fundamental face of death.
The Judgment Page 25
