Intruder

by Peter Blauner

  Philip gets up and ambles over to the bookshelf where Jake keeps his law books and various presents from Dana and Alex.

  “See, in the neighborhood I come from ...” Philip stops and corrects himself. “In the neighborhood we come from, there’s always been what I like to call the social contract. Am I right? That’s what holds us together. One hand washes the other. You scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours. You understand what I’m talking about, Jake? The idea that we can trust each other to fulfill the obligations we’ve made to each other.”

  He picks up the gold Tiffany clock Dana bought for Jake on their twelfth wedding anniversary and watches the movement of the hands. “So I got this theory,” he says, deliberately pronouncing the word as “teary.” “When that social contract breaks down, we break down. As a society.”

  He drops the clock on the red-and-beige carpet and puts his left foot over it, like he’s about to crush it. “Oh, forgive me,” he says. “How clumsy.”

  “Okay, I’d like you to leave now,” says Jake.

  But Philip has turned back to the bookcase and grabbed the maroon-and-gold Oriental vase Dana bought for him at a West-Chester antiques fair. “I’d even go so far as to say, that’s the cause of all our problems today. We’re not teaching young people the right values. What do you think?”

  He puts the vase down and cuts his finger on its chipped lip. Jake’s been meaning to have it fixed.

  “Ah shit,” says Philip, looking at a trickle of blood on his thumb.

  He puts his hand up to his mouth. Jake starts to rise and come toward him. But now Philip is holding a stumpy ceramic figure of the baseball pitcher Dwight Gooden. Alex molded and glazed it in fourth-grade art class.

  “Forgive me if I misunderstood the terms of our contract,” Philip says, examining the figure. “Forgive me if I mistook you for a man of honor, who kept his word. I didn’t realize you were just another fucking lawyer.”

  He drops Dwight Gooden. The figure bangs a shelf on its way down and breaks into pieces on the carpet. Jake moves to his left a little. The distant subway rumble he thought he’d heard before is roaring between his ears now.

  “So what are you gonna do, Counselor, take a swing at me?” Philip smiles.

  Before Jake can answer, the door opens and Deborah sticks her massive dyed-blond head in the room.

  “Hey,” she says. “Todd and the other partners are waiting for you. They just had the whole horse-and-hound crowd pull in. Don’t be fooling around in here.”

  “I’ll be right with you,” says Jake.

  “Everything all right?” She looks from Jake to Philip, as if she’s assessing her chances of taking both of them in hand-to-hand combat.

  Jake starts to back away from Philip. The magnetic force that brought them together has been defused by the presence of a woman in the room. The confrontation is over, for the moment.

  “Come on, Jake, shake a leg,” Deborah says sternly.

  It’s not clear to Jake how much of the commotion she heard before she decided to interrupt, but he’s reminded of the debt he owes her. My guardian angel to the rescue again. Even Philip seems a little intimidated. He drops his eyes to avoid looking at her and leaves a card on the edge of Jake’s desk between two piles of legal papers.

  “There,” he mumbles. ‘In case you come to your senses.”

  He leaves. Deborah looks at the clock and the broken baseball player on the floor.

  “You’re paying this guy to be your contractor?” she asks.

  “Something like that.” Jake hunches his shoulders and goes back behind his desk.

  “Why don’t you call my cousin Georgie? He’ll wreck your house for free.”

  29

  John Gates,” says the emergency room doctor named Wadhwa. “Do we have a John Gates?”

  Slowly a pile of clothes begins to rise from the corner. A gray blanket, part of a blue official-looking shirt, ripped jeans, a matted beard. Haltingly the mass limps toward him.

  Homeless man number three on the shift. It’s been a wild night in the ER. There’s a black man covered in white flour wearing bunny ears, who says he’s Hitler and clearly should be at the psych ER but for the cut on his neck. A fat pink woman near him is squatting on the floor and grunting as if she’s about to give birth, though she’s obviously not pregnant. A little earlier in the evening, the cops brought in a deli guy who got his right hand caught in a meat grinder. The machine with the hand still in it arrives twenty minutes later.

  “I’m John Gates,” says the pile of clothes.

  “This way please,” says Dr. Wadhwa, a young resident from Bombay with a pudgy build and a clipped colonial school English accent.

  He leads Gates into a room and has him sit down on an examining table. “What’s wrong with you?”

  “You see, this lawyer Mr. Schiff brought some people to the tunnels under Riverside Park and they attacked me with their baseball bats ...”

  The doctor nods absently, unimpressed. He’s beginning to think the beggars of New York are no match for the ones back home when it comes to creative delusions.

  “So what kind of injuries did you sustain?” asks the doctor, wondering if he should even bother inquiring whether the patient has any insurance.

  Like a museum curator displaying an art exhibit, Gates lifts his shirt, revealing an ugly purplish yellow bruise on his ribs. Possibly several broken. He bows and gives the doctor a good look at a grapefruit-sized knot on the side of his head. When he glances up, Dr. Wadhwa sees Gates’s nose has been broken and blood is caked into his beard.

  No question: somebody has given this gentleman a good beating. Probably best to get a rib series and some film of the nose.

  “So when did all this happen?”

  “The night before last.” Gates shudders. “I been trying to sleep it off and forget about it. But now I’m scared those guys with the bats are gonna come after me.”

  “I see . . .”

  Gates coughs and the doctor makes him put on a mask that looks like an athletic supporter. It’s getting to be like a TB ward in here. Gates winces when a strap touches his nose but otherwise seems too whipped to protest.

  “There’s something else I have to tell you,” Gates says, his voice muffled.

  “Yes?”

  “I’ve got it.”

  “Got what?”

  “The virus.”

  “I see.” The doctor gets a pair of rubber gloves out of a cellophane package and puts them on. “Are you just HIV-positive or do you have full-blown AIDS?”

  “Whatever. I got the virus.”

  “Well, have you been tested?” The doctor pauses and pulls on the long right middle finger of his glove.

  “Why do I wanna get tested? I know what I got.”

  Across the room, there’s a commotion. Two police officers and two doctors are trying to pry open the meat grinder and retrieve the deli guy’s hand.

  Dr. Wadhwa rests his fingers on the examining table next to Gates and then draws them back up quickly, as if he’s been burned. A pinprick. He looks down nervously, searching for a needle that might have stuck him. He sees nothing, though, and there’s no hole in his glove. It’s just morbid imagination. But enough’s enough. This man should get an AIDS test.

  “So what’d you do?” he asks Gates. “Shoot up with somebody else’s works? Have sex with somebody in a risk category?”

  Gates’s eyes linger on a doorway across the hall where a trauma team is working on a victim of a subway shooting.

  “I was with somebody who had it,” he says in a vacant absent voice.

  “Did they tell you that afterwards?”

  “During.”

  The doctor shakes his head. It takes all kinds in this country.

  “I still think perhaps you should be tested. Otherwise you’ll never know for sure.”

  Gates’s jaw drops and swivels a little, as if it’s trying to act independently from the rest of his face. The eyes remain cloudy and confused, though.
“I know what’s going on,” he says. “I was exposed.”

  Amazing, thinks the doctor. The difference in attitudes about dying between here and India. This man has already made up his mind he wants to die. So why stop him? Too many people come through here begging and praying for a second chance. Small children, old women, young men in the prime of their lives. They’re brought in talking, pleading with you to save their lives, scared out of their minds. One minute they seem okay, a couple of hours later they’re dead from a bullet doctors can’t get to in time. In some cases, they don’t even know there’s a chance they’re going to die, which just makes the end that much more sad and horrible.

  “Well you should at least get your T cell count,” says Wadhwa, giving it one last try. “Then you can find out what kind of preventive medication you can take. There’s different stages, you know. One set of antibiotics fights off pneumonia. Another set’s for eye problems ...”

  “Doesn’t matter. I’m still gonna die.”

  “Well then you might as well be comfortable,” the doctor says.

  30

  Jake takes the next morning off from work and goes to see his old friend Andrew Botwin, attorney-at-law.

  In the ten years since they worked at Legal Aid together, Andy has flourished, even more lavishly than Jake. His practice has expanded to include hotel chain executives, television producers, CEOs with awkward divorces, and celebrities with a habit of punching out photographers. His face appears regularly on Court TV and the cover of American Lawyer. You don’t go to Andy to win a case. You go to him to settle it. The consummate deal maker. People say that in the days of old, Andy could have gotten probation for the Salem witches.

  “How the hell are you?” he says, rising from behind a clean desk with an inlaid leather top.

  Jake’s eyes slide over to the framed bookjacket on the wall with Andy’s smiling face in bright color. Then he looks back at Andy, holding the identical smile under his bushy eyebrows and moustache.

  “I’m good, Andy. But probably not as good as you.”

  “You’re kind to say that.” He shakes Jake’s hand warmly and gestures for him to sit down. “How’s Dana and Alex?”

  “Fine and fine.”

  “It’s funny. I had a client in here the other day whose son has encephalitis, just like your boy did. I’m glad everything worked out.”

  Andy sits in his leather chair and tilts back so he appears to be looking at a corner of the ceiling, a familiar pose from the network panel shows. The thinker. The pontificator. Jake is having trouble separating his actual memories of Andy from the image he projects on television.

  “So what brings you here today?” he asks Jake.

  Where to begin? Jake hesitates and sees Andy’s eyes narrow even as his smile remains in place. “I was wondering if you could make some inquiries for me,” he says.

  “About what?” The smile starts to thin.

  “There was an incident in Riverside Park the other night. I was trying to find out where the police were with their investigation.”

  Andy looks confused, as if somebody had just switched his furniture around. The phone rings and he picks it up.

  “Yeah?” The bushy eyebrows waggle. “ABC? Put ‘em through.”

  He holds up one finger to tell Jake this will take only a minute. “Sandra, my love!” he exclaims into the receiver. “How the hell are you?”

  His features move close together in concentration as Jake studies some of the other pictures on his wall. Andy with Geraldo Rivera. Andy in boxing gloves squaring off with the heavyweight champ. Andy with a bunch of shaggy-haired heavy-metal musicians gripping V-shaped electric guitars.

  “Are we on or off the record now?” Andy is saying into the phone. “There’s no way he’s going to appear before the judge like that. All right? I don’t care what the DA says.”

  He listens intently for a few more seconds, holding the finger up at Jake again.

  “I’ll tell you what,” he says into the receiver. “Have a camera guy here by quarter to six. We can go live with him . . . Really, an exclusive . . . Love you too. Bye.”

  He hangs up. “So I don’t get it,” he says to Jake, not missing a beat from their previous conversation. “You need me to make inquiries to the police for you? About one of your clients?”

  Jake clears his throat and lowers his eyes. One of his wing tips is untied and the black lace lies like a tiny snake on the white Indian rug. “This might be something a little closer to home, Andy.”

  A long, lawyerly pause. They both know the proper etiquette here. Don’t tell your lawyer anything until he asks.

  “So,” says Andy. “You don’t feel comfortable talking to the DA about this yourself?”

  “Well, you know, Norman and I don’t have the best history.”

  Andy nods. The old story. A couple of years back, when Norman McCarthy, the current Manhattan district attorney, was the ambitious executive assistant, he’d had a mob stool called Vinnie the Razor making a case for him against one of Jake’s clients, Ralph Ingelleria. It turned out Vinnie was addicted to tranquilizers. So true-blue, straight-arrow Norman McCarthy had his wife, an earnest young registered nurse, bring Valium and Percodan right into Vinnie’s jail cell. Naturally, Jake put Norman’s wife on the stand and forced her to testify about Vinnie’s precarious mental state, and Norman, naturally, never forgave Jake.

  “All right, so there’s a lot of water under the bridge and there’s a lot of water over the bridge,” says Andy.

  “There isn’t any bridge at all.” Jake wraps his knuckles around the claw at the end of the left armrest. “That’s why I need you to make these inquiries for me.”

  “Well, can you narrow down what I’m asking about?”

  “I believe there might have been a murder in the tunnel under the park two nights ago. In fact, there may have been two murders. I’d imagine the police are looking to talk to someone who knows something about them.”

  “And you might be that someone?” Andy’s eyebrows rise and his chair tips back at an even more precipitous angle.

  “Yes.”

  “And does anyone else know what happened?”

  “Yeah, the guy who did the actual killing. He came by my office yesterday to pressure me.”

  “I see,” says Andy, getting out a pad to take notes. “And is he likely to make a statement to the police on his own?”

  “I wouldn’t think so.”

  The phone rings again.

  “Yes? CNN?” Andy cradles the receiver against the side of his neck as he puts down the notepad and takes an electronic appointment book out of his inside jacket pocket. He punches a few numbers. “Well if three o’clock doesn’t work for them, tell them we can do the interview at four-thirty.”

  The phone goes back on the hook and the appointment book goes back in his pocket. Jake feels an uneasy fluttering in his gut.

  “Look, Andy, if you don’t have time for this, I completely understand ...”

  Andy brings the chair forward so suddenly that he almost bangs his elbows on the desk top. “Oh come on, Jake. You’re like family. I wouldn’t let this fall between the cracks.”

  Jake studies his old friend again and tries to remember what specific cases they worked on at Legal Aid together. None come to mind, but somehow he feels comforted in Andy’s presence. It’s not just media hype, he tells himself. Andy cares about him.

  “So you’re sure you don’t mind checking this out for me? Do you want a retainer?”

  “Oh please, Jake.” Andy waves his right hand through the air like a dismissive butterfly. “Your money’s no good here. Now tell me some more about what happened.”

  31

  Hey asshole!”

  Walt Matuszyk, a muscular guy with black hair extensions, looks up. Philip Cardi is getting out of a blue Honda Accord. His cousin Ronnie remains in the car with a guy called Faffy and a pale blonde girl in the backseat.

  Philip climbs up onto the loading dock where Walt�
�s been working, behind a supermarket in lower Manhattan.

  “Nice-looking girl,” Philip says, looking back at the car. “Be a shame to put her head under a truck’s tire.”

  The girl looks sullen and bored in the back, like she’s stuck in calculus class.

  “Look, look, Phil, I’m sorry,” says Walt. “Tell Carmine, I know I fucked up. I’ll have him the rest of the money a week from Saturday.”

  “He’s gettin’ tired of hearing that.” Philip squints up at the sun. “There someplace we can talk around here?”

  “Why do we have to go anywhere?”

  Philip nods and Ronnie gets out of the car to join them.

  “Oh now,” says Walt, the hair extensions hanging halfway down his back with colored beads on the ends. “We don’t have to do it like this, do we Phil?”

  “We do it like this, or we take her for a ride.”

  Walt looks over at his girl and gets nothing back.

  “All right, let’s go downstairs.”

  “Spoken like a true gentleman,” says Philip.

  They descend to the boiler room and Ronnie shuts the door.

  “You’re a fuckin’ moron, Walt.” Philip turns on him. “Carmine’s given you every break. He used to like you, you know.”

  “I know, it’s just, like, what can I say, Phil? I got rotten timing. Check that. I got no timing. A guy says he’s gonna come through for me with half a kilo, he shows up with twelve pounds of marijuana. Kiddie dope. You know, who smokes marijuana? Bunch of fuckin’ Deadheads and college students. They practically give away joints at the registrar’s office. What do they need me for? So now I’m stuck. Give me another week, I’ll unload the whole thing.”

  Philip kicks him hard between the legs and Walt crumples to the floor.

  “So what’s gonna happen in a week? You gonna go to five more topless places where you gonna go around stuffing twenties into girls? You think my uncle wasn’t going to find out about that? Jesus Christ, you motherfucker. I oughta do that girl outside a favor right now and blow your fuckin’ head off. Save her the heartache you’re gonna cause her later.”