He stops and tries to read Bob’s expression again. But there’s still nothing there. No crinkling around the eyes or tightening of the mouth. Just that hrrmmm phlegmy rumble from the back of his throat.
“So that’s why I was a little concerned that you haven’t sent over the Poverman contracts yet,” Jake says.
“My regular girl, Ingrid, is out. This new one, Felicia, doesn’t know her ass from her elbow. ...”
“Bob.” Jake puts the glass down. “Is there a problem?”
Bob clears his throat once more. God, it sounds like he has a carburetor in his larynx.
“Jakey,” he says, slowly sitting up. “You know, Chet Allan and I go back a long time.”
Jake hears a high-pitched bell sound ringing in his ear.
“No, I didn’t know that.”
Bob hocks into his handkerchief and folds it up. “Well, it was before your time,” he says. “Chet helped me with some exigencies a few years back.”
“Exigencies? I’ve never heard you use a word that long before.”
“It means you do today what gets you to tomorrow.”
“Actually it means situations requiring immediate attention.”
“Whatever. Chet did me a favor with the attorney general’s office when they were looking into some code violations I had up in East Tremont. Serious business, you know. They had a couple of fires and an old lady died when the roof fell in on her. Christ, it was awful. Newspapers calling, some schvartze assemblyman from up there yelling for my head. Anyway, Chetty made it all go away. So you can see how I’d owe him.”
Jake is aware that the lull in conversation around them has become a valley. Bob’s eyes have receded into his skull, as if they’ve seen enough of this life.
“So you want Chet Allan to represent you instead of me? Is that what you’re saying?”
“Look, kid.” Bob pulls a Cuban cigar out of his pocket even though smoking is not allowed in the restaurant. “I’m in a tough spot. I’m not managing tenements in the Bronx anymore. I’m trying to build hospitals, corporate quarters. I’m with the fucking School Construction Board. I can’t have a convicted felon negotiating for me . . .”
“I haven’t been convicted of anything, Bob.”
“Whatever.” Bob lights the cigar and waves the first puff of smoke away. “You know what I’m talking about, kid. How would it look, the situation you’re in right now? These ‘respectable’ people. They wouldn’t understand. Think of the stories in the newspaper.”
Somehow the white tabletop seems suddenly to rise toward Jake’s face.
“But Bob,” he says, struggling to keep an even voice, “you know I need this work. I need you as my client. Todd Bracken wants to throw me out on my ass.”
“Kid, I’m sure it’s just going to be a temporary thing. Just until the smoke clears.”
But in fact, the smoke isn’t clearing. It’s thickening over the table and Jake finds himself vaguely nauseated. Without Bob and some of the other major clients he’s lost in the last few weeks, he’s as good as dead at Bracken, Williams.
So all the things he’s done for Bob—winning the settlement disputes, breaking the tenants’ union, diving Kamikaze-style on Noel Wolf, protecting him from Philip Cardi—have meant nothing. He realizes now that he misjudged Bob as badly as he misjudged Philip. This is not the gruff but benevolent father figure he’d been looking for. This is a shrewd businessman who understands when an asset has lost its usefulness. Jake is ashamed of himself for losing sight of the distinction.
“So this is just another exigency, right, Bob?” he says, trying to hide the wound in his voice.
“Everything’s an exigency, kid.” He looks down and sees his cigar has gone out.
“But how could you do this?” Jake asks, before he can stop himself. “I thought I was like a son to you.”
Bob relights the cigar. “I don’t speak to my son.”
66
It’s the cars that start all the trouble,” says Mrs. Vogliano from the bakery.
“The cars,” says Rolando Goodman, the private investigator working for Jake and Susan Hoffman.
“In this neighborhood, a girl sees a guy has a nice car and that’s it. That’s all she cares about. She doesn’t look at his character. You know what I’m saying?”
“For sure.”
Rolando looks out the window to make sure no one’s touched his white Lexus, parked out on Eighteenth Avenue.
For the last week or so, he’s been walking up and down the streets of Bensonhurst, stopping into every other store and shop to ask about Philip Cardi. Rolando knows people have been questioning his abilities lately and he’s determined to show he’s worth $500 a day as an investigator.
So finding this Mrs. Vogliano is the break he’s been looking for. She’s the first person he’s found who’ll say more than “I don’t know nothing about nothing.” She has a full pulpy face and a hard raspy voice.
“Now the one we’re talking about, this Philip,” she says, curling her lip, “he had an Alfa Romeo or something like that. His uncle gave it to him. A Christmas present, he says. Ha! They stole it right off the street, those two. And Philip drove it around until he ran it into a guardrail on the BQE. But my niece, she didn’t care. She wasn’t dumb, just kind of naive. She saw he had a nice car. She didn’t pay any attention to any of the things people were saying about this boy.”
“What kind of things?”
“You know. That there was something wrong with him. That he had a screw loose. You understand? He went around saying he’d been to Vietnam but he’d never been out of boot camp. He had some problem with one of the other boys.”
“So, did they go out?”
“No, but they were friendly like. You know, my niece, she didn’t have many friends, growing up around here.” She leans across the counter and whispers. “She’s half Puerto Rican.”
The bakery is empty, but Rolando plays along, making a big O with his mouth.
“You see, my sister Val, she married a Puerto Rican fella,” says Mrs. Vogliano, casting a wary eye around before she brings her voice back up. “And a lot of people in this neighborhood didn’t like that. They stayed away from the daughter. Understand? Like she was unclean. I’m not saying everyone here is prejudiced but some of them are.”
“I noticed,” says Rolando.
“There you go.” Mrs. Vogliano points toward the window and winks. “So my niece didn’t have nobody to hang around with, being half Puerto Rican and all. So when this Philip Cardi was just a little nicer, it meant the world to her. And when he came around in a nice car, forget about it. It was all over. She would’ve gone to the moon for him. She followed him everywhere. In fact, can I tell you something?”
“What?”
Again, she looks around furtively, like she’s worried the stale brioches and cannoli are listening. “I think she had a little crush on him,” she says sotto voce.
“Is that right?”
“And then he goes and does this terrible thing to her in the warehouse.” Mrs. Vogliano thrusts out her hands as if she’s trying to give him the dilemma to solve.
“It’s sick,” Rolando says agreeably.
Mrs. Volgliano shakes her head and sighs. “It breaks your heart. I tell you.”
“So what happened?”
She stoops her shoulders. “Who can say? She asked him a question and he didn’t like it. Something she’d heard about him. The way he was. You know?”
“No, I don’t know.”
She cups her hand around her mouth and whispers again. “She heard he was a maricon. Understand? We call it a mameluke. So—how would you say?—he got upset with her.”
“I got it.” Rolando straightens his tie. “So your niece is still alive?”
“She works at this bar on Mulberry Street, in Little Italy. Like I was telling you.”
“Would she be willing to talk to me and my client about what Philip Cardi did to her?”
“That I couldn’t te
ll you. She has to speak for herself.” Ms. Vogliano looks down at her reddened hands on top of the glass counter display case. “But it was a shame, I tell you.”
“Maybe I’ll stop by and see her.”
“Your client a white guy?”
“Yes.”
“And does he have other white people who work for him the way you do?” Parts of her face turn purple and her eyes get as small as dots on dice.
“I don’t know. Maybe.”
“Then maybe you ought to send one of them instead. People in this bar can be kind of particular.”
67
Carmine calls Philip on the telephone.
“Some shine just called the bar downtown, asking about you,” he says. “Said he was an investigator for your Jew lawyer.”
“Who did he talk to?”
“Isabel.”
Philip slips his fingers through the coils of the phone wire. “She tell him anything?”
“No. But he said he might come by and see her.”
Silence.
“Let me just remind you about something, Philip,” says his uncle. “I don’t like lawyers coming around my bar, asking questions. Your problems should never become my problems.”
“I know that, C.”
“So keep it that way. Shit doesn’t go back in a donkey.”
68
The Wallaces aren’t doing the Christmas party at their house this year,” says Dana from the kitchen.
“At their house.” Jake looks up from the piles of court papers and case folders that cover the dining room table like Indian burial mounds.
“Yes. That’s what I said. At their house. You think they’re doing it somewhere else without telling us?”
“Yeah, they are.”
“Well that’s just your paranoia.” She takes a bottle of Columbia Crest chardonnay out of the refrigerator, $4 cheaper than the Kendall-Jackson she was drinking two months ago.
“No, it’s not,” Jake says matter-of-factly. “I ran into Dave Curtis on the street. He asked if we were coming to the Wallaces’ party at Jim McMullen’s.”
“The restaurant on the East Side?”
“The very place.”
“That can’t be right.” Dana pours herself a glass of wine and comes into the living room. “Kathy told me they weren’t doing it at their house this year.”
“Don’t look so stunned. At least she didn’t lie to you. Technically. They’re not doing it at the house. Right?”
Dana shakes her head. “I don’t get it. She’s been one of my best friends since college.”
“Oh, I get it.”
Dana puts down her glass and does a yoga stretch with her arms. This is what their lives have become. No one has come right out and said they are now socially ostracized. It’s been a more subtle kind of strangulation: unreturned phone calls, brief and awkward conversations on the street. What’s worse, though, is what’s happened to their marriage. All they ever talk about anymore is THE CASE. Everything else—all gestures of tenderness and intimacy—have been flattened by the weight of the impending trial, which is supposed to start in ten days. Those fleeting moments of distance between them have stretched out into weeks. Jake can’t remember the last time they touched each other with any real warmth. The opposite sides of the bed have become lonely outposts.
“Alex get home?”
“Over an hour ago,” Dana says. “He’s upstairs listening to Gregorian chants. Can’t you hear them?”
Cold moaning flutters down from the stereo. Jake finally looks up and catches her staring at him.
“You hungry?” he says.
But what he means is: I’m drowning.
Before she can answer, the phone in the kitchen rings and she runs to get it.
He goes back to reviewing documents about Abraham Collingwood. The deceased. Until recently, he’s just been the VICTIM, like the anonymous coefficient in an algebra problem. Something to be worked around in a trial. But now the details of his life take on new import. Born in Bed-Stuy to a drug-addicted mother and a prison-bound father. Raised by a series of overwhelmed and underfinanced aunts and grandparents. In and out of foster homes and mental facilities from the time he was ten. One year at the School for Performing Arts, two arrests for sale of controlled substances, three-quarters of a tour in Vietnam cut short by a shrapnel injury and a rat bite. The rest of his life spent drifting aimlessly with the occasional arrest for assault or robbery and a couple of trips to Rikers until he finally came to rest underground. Not a bad guy when you added it up. Just a bad case of wrong-place-at-the-wrong-time-itis.
Jake knows he should be thinking of ways to taint his character and drain the jury’s reservoir of sympathy. But for some reason, he’s finding he doesn’t have the heart for it. He’s defended worse people in his time. Much worse.
Dana finishes her phone call and comes back into the dining room.
“Dana.” Jake puts down the case folder and stands up. “I think we have to consider the possibility that I . . .”
He looks at her, expecting her to finish the sentence for him. But they’re not connected that way anymore.
“We have to consider the possibility that I may not win this case,” he says slowly.
“I don’t want to hear that.”
Her vehemence surprises him, like a bright light in a dark room.
“Well, I think we have to start planning around the idea that I might go to prison,” he says, trying to sound stoic. “I want to make sure you and Alex are going to be taken care of. You know most of the money is—”
“Don’t talk like that.”
“I’m just trying—”
“You’re just trying to make yourself sick.”
A flicker of familiar feeling.
She takes off her glasses and starts fussing with her hair. “I don’t know why you’re giving up all of a sudden. I thought Rolando just tracked down the girl from the warehouse for you. Aren’t you going to see her tomorrow?”
“Yeah, but she’s probably not going to talk to me.”
“And what about that old case you were going to cite to keep the fingerprint evidence out?”
“Ah, Susan says it’s probably not going to fly with this judge.”
The judge at his trial is going to be a former defense lawyer named Henry Frankenthaler. Thaler the Brawler, they called him when Jake was at Legal Aid. In court, Henry liked to stand and bluster in oratory that would make Cicero blush. But behind the scenes, he was always the first lawyer to sell out his client and take whatever deal the prosecutor was offering. For that reason, other attorneys hated to work with him in cases involving multiple defendants; by the time you got to court, Henry had already arranged for his guy to testify against all the others. When you’d ask him about it later, he’d simply sniff and act like the fault was yours for not getting to the slops quickly enough. “He who hesitates is lunch.” It doesn’t bode well for Jake’s case.
“Well, would you like to hear some good news?” says Dana, sitting down.
“Sure. Something. Anything.”
“I think I just got the name of the shelter where John Gates is staying.”
Almost automatically, Jake stands up and moves toward the phone in the kitchen. “Oh my God, hon, that’s great.”
All of a sudden, he feels like a shaken can of soda. Everything’s rising. He makes himself stop to kiss her on top of the head before he trots into the kitchen.
“I gotta get a hold of Susan and Rolando so we can make arrangements to see him right away ...”
“Ah.” She clears her throat. “Maybe that’s not such a good idea.”
He pauses in the kitchen doorway. “Why not?”
“The last time you saw him, you brought two guys with baseball bats. He may not feel that comfortable talking to you.”
He comes back into the dining room, carrying the cellular phone. “Dana, I tried to save Gates and his friend. How long’s it going to be until you believe that?”
“
It’s not important what I believe, Jake. It’s important that we get out of this.”
“I didn’t do it.”
“That’s what you keep telling me.”
He puts the phone down and looks at that fourth chair at the table. Again, there’s that space between them. Jake wishes there were a child there who could bring the two of them together in a hug. But Alex is busy with his homework and his dreary monks’ chanting. Maybe it’s not just garden variety my-dad’s-an-asshole contempt Jake’s been experiencing these last few weeks. Maybe the case really is getting to Alex. But Jake still isn’t sure what he should say to his son.
“All right.” He turns back to Dana. “So if I’m not going to do it, who is going to talk to Gates?”
“I was thinking I would,” she says, straightening an unruly stack of documents. “I was the one who found him.”
“Forget about it. No fucking way. You’re not going there yourself. The guy’s violently psychotic.”
“Actually he never got a diagnosis. I suspect it was probably schizoaffective disorder made worse by drug abuse, but it shouldn’t be a problem if he isn’t getting high anymore.”
“Don’t even think about it. It’s too dangerous. You’re not going.”
“I am going,” she says, clearing a space on the tabletop so she can put dinner plates down. “It’s a shelter, Jake. There’ll be plenty of other people around.”
“You don’t know what these guys are like.”
“I do know what they’re like. I work with them every day. You can’t pull rank on me anymore, Jake.”
He starts to argue with her, but a dull throbbing pain in his chest stops him. He pauses for a few seconds, with his hand over his heart, waiting for it to pass. These last few weeks have been more than hard; they’ve put twenty years on him. He’s noticed new aches in his joints and new shades of gray in his hair. Anxiety is turning him into an old man just in time for his prison term.
“It’s my war,” he says, trying to keep up a game face.
“You can’t do it alone.”
“I’ve always done it alone.”
Intruder Page 27
