Emmett was sitting in the Jimmy in the same place. “How’d it go?” he asked.
“Like clockwork. Let’s go home. I need to make some calls.”
The first one was to her husband. She described her day, to which he replied, “He actually said, ‘There’s no law in Robbens County’?”
“Words to that effect.”
“So I reckon you’re gonna have to tame that town with your blazing six-gun, clean up the bad guys, and save the farmers.”
“Oh, stuff it! And it’s miners in any case, and I’m not going to clean up anything. I just want to get this poor schmuck out of jail and get the cops to do their job. That might be a problem, if Poole is right about the state of local justice. He seemed like he still has enough brain cells left to convey actual facts. We shall see. What’s happening in the real world?”
“You didn’t hear? Probably the stagecoach with the paper didn’t get there yet.”
“Hey, half the people around here are watching CNN on satellite as we speak. What happened?”
“Oh, some hyped Latino kid tried to stick up a grocery over in Alphabet City with a cheap .22. The guy who ran it was one of our fine recent immigrants from East Asia. When he understood what the kid was doing, he hauls out this native blade and goes for him. The kid shoots him, the guy takes the bullet and keeps chopping. End of story? Our storekeeper cuts the kid’s head off and places it in his window. The body gets tossed in the Dumpster. Apparently that’s what they do in the colorful markets of his native land. It discourages thievery, he says.”
“I bet it does. He speaks English?”
“He barely speaks Chinese. No, we had to get a guy down from Columbia to translate. Where is my daughter when I need her? Anyway, he’s a Karen, apparently, from Burma or Myanmar or whatever the hell they’re calling it today. Totally illegal, of course, and we don’t have relations with his country of origin. I love this town.”
“Is self-defensive decapitation an offense?”
“Not as such. Probably get him on failure to properly dispose of a corpse, a D-class misdemeanor, and failure to report a crime. I’d love to bring that one into the criminal courts with the litterers and fare jumpers. Meanwhile the Latino community is up in arms and the Asians want to give him a medal. The poor little shit!”
“Who, the kid or the Karen?”
“Both. Once again we are reminded that the law is a cultural construct.”
“Which also reminds me: Do you know anyone at the Department of Labor?”
“Not really. Why?”
“Because if this place is as corrupt as Poole says it is, we may need some federal muscle. Isn’t killing a union leader a federal case?”
“It might be,” said Karp after a moment’s consideration. “I know someone who would know for sure, though.”
“Who? Oh, right, your guy Sterner.”
“Uh-huh. Saul would be the one to call. Strangely enough, I have a message slip from him right here. I was just about to call him when you called.”
“Well, see what he has to say and let me know. If I can pass this stinker off to someone real, I’ll be a happy Girl Scout.”
7
KARP DIALED THE NUMBER ON the message slip, area code 202, a Washington number. Saul Sterner was a macher in that town, or had been. Karp tried to figure out how old he was. He’d been general counsel at Labor in the Johnson administration and then done labor law for a while at the highest levels, chief counsel for the mine workers and then for the AFL-CIO. Somewhere in between all that, he had taught for a half dozen years at Boalt Hall, the University of California Law School, which was where Karp had met him. They had kept in touch on and off over the years. He must be eighty, at least, Karp thought.
But the voice over the phone was vigorous, the old New York accent softened neither by the years nor by dwelling among the mighty.
“Butch, you momzer, how the hell are you?”
“Can’t complain. How about you?”
“I can complain, and I do, but no one listens. How’s Keegan treating you?”
“Oh, you know Jack. He has his little ways.”
Sterner chuckled. “That’s what I hear. Listen, let’s get together. I need your counsel on an issue.”
Karp doubted this; Sterner famously had as much use for counsel as a guided missile. “I’m flattered. What kind of counsel?”
“Ehhh . . . a little something out in the country, a union thing.”
“You don’t want to talk about it on the phone.”
“Not particularly. Let’s have lunch tomorrow. I haven’t seen you in a million years.”
“You want me to come down there?”
“Nah, I’ll come up. I got some things at the federal courthouse in the morning. We’ll sit, we’ll eat pastrami, we’ll talk.”
“Sam’s on Canal?”
“Perfect!”
“I’ll be there. Listen, Saul . . . it’s funny, because I was just about to call you. It’s something you’d probably know about. Marlene’s down in West Virginia working for some friends, a couple of young men. Their dad was killed, actually the whole family, father, mother, and sister, all shot in their home. Marlene thinks it could be related to a labor problem. There’s a possibility that the murders came out of a disputed union election. What’d be the federal interest there, if any?” There was silence on the line for so long that Karp thought they might have been cut off. “Saul? Hello?”
“Yeah. What’s she doing there, Marlene? I thought she was out of the PI business.”
“Well, yeah, she is. This was a favor. The woman who was killed was a friend of hers, from the Island, and her kids think there’s something fishy going on with the investigation. From her first pass at it, so does she. They picked up a retarded guy and tried to stick him with it, but she says it’s a frame, and clumsy, too.”
“Well, that’s very interesting, Butch. I should say, small world. That was just what I wanted to talk to you about as a matter of fact.”
“The Heeney murders?”
“Them. Let’s say twelve-thirty at Sam’s on Canal.” Click.
* * *
Karp recalled that Saul Sterner had a thing about punctuality. Teaching, he would ceremoniously lock the doors of his classroom at the stroke of the hour. After a couple of weeks, everyone was on time or had dropped the course, and at that point he gave a little lecture on the subject: Ladies and gentlemen, the legal profession begins with the ability to show up at a certain place, a courtroom, at a time certain. If you can’t do that, I don’t care to waste my time talking to you.
Karp was, accordingly, there at the minute and found Sterner waiting for him in the bright and noisy dining room, dressed, as always, in a brown suit off the rack and 100 percent made by union labor in the United States. No pinstripes for him, the uniform of the enemy, no foreign-sweated stitchery. In the old days, it would have been covered with cigarette ash, but no more. As Karp approached the table, Sterner was reading the menu through bifocals, reading it suspiciously, as if it were a defective opinion, his chin down on his chest, his pugnacious jaw and the thick lower lip thrust out in concentration. His head was large for his stocky body, his nose was large, too, the forehead over it wide, freckled, and fringed by white, curly hair. His hand delivered a crushing grip still. Karp thought he looked good for a man as old as he was and said, as he sat down, “You’re looking good, Saul.”
“Ahhh, you don’t know. It’s no fun getting old. Every time I forget my keys nowadays, it’s oy vay, Alzheimer’s.”
“Never.”
“Hey, everything passes. I’m happy, I had a good life, I knocked some heads, I kicked some heinie. What more can you ask?”
“That’s the secret of life? Knocking heads?”
“You mean it’s not?” said Sterner, miming wonder, and laughed. “Meanwhile, I’m having the corned beef. The waiter says the pastrami is dry. This I take as a symbol of the end of the world as I knew it. That there should be dry pastrami at Sam’
s on Canal Street. A shandah! Also, the waiter was a Lebanese kid instead of an old Yid who would tell me I was lucky to get pastrami at all.” Sterner laughed again. “Tell me, do I sound enough like an old fart yet, or should I mention my bladder?”
The waiter arrived and took their order without insult or badinage. The two men exchanged small talk for a while, until Sterner leaned closer and peered at Karp over the tops of his lenses. “So. Tell me what you know about Red Heeney.”
“Next to nothing. His wife’s family happened to own the place next to the one Marlene bought out by Southold. They became friendly on the beach. Their youngest is . . . was, I mean, the same age as our twins. I met Heeney once at a cookout.”
“What did you think?”
Karp hesitated. “Frankly? Not to speak ill, but he wasn’t my type. He jumped me as a matter of fact. Wanted to punch my face.”
“You probably deserved it.”
“I usually do. But I take it you were a fan of his.”
“Well, he wasn’t a friend, if that’s what you mean, but, yeah, I guess you could say a fan. What I liked about him, he was a fighter. My God, twenty-five years of organizing, and in that hellhole, too, first with the chemical workers and the operating engineers, and then with this cockamamy union they got, the Mining Equipment Operators.”
“What’s wrong with it?”
“Oh, it’s a company union,” Sterner answered with a sneer. “A piece of shit. It belongs to the Majestic Coal Company, has since the year one. Red thought he could get in there and turn it around from the inside. And they killed him for it. Something like this hasn’t happened since Jock Yablonski back in ’69. You remember that, don’t you?”
“Vaguely. They killed the whole family there, too, didn’t they?”
“Yeah, in Clarksville, Pennsylvania. Jock was fighting for the presidency of the UMW. Tony Boyle was president, a corrupt dirtbag, and they had an election and Tony stole it. Tough Tony Boyle. He had some local hillbillies do it, and we were able to trace it back to him, through the payoffs. He died in jail.”
“And you’re assuming it’s the same deal here?”
“Absolutely. They never learn anything, these bastards. I’ll tell you one thing about Red Heeney. He was the real stuff. You know, the goddamn pathetic labor movement we got in this great land of ours, they’re all waiting for the one, like the Jews waited for Moses. They don’t expect the revolution anymore, they’re not that stupid. They just want a labor leader who won’t make them sick, who won’t be found with his hand in the pensions or in bed with the Mob. A mensch—a Gene Debs, a Walter Reuther. A working-class leader, with arms on him.” Here he made a fist and pushed back his sleeve to demonstrate what an arm was. His was still impressive; he had acquired it humping sides of beef at a meatpacker’s while working his way through college and law school. “Not one of these shifty-eyed bozos in sharp suits they got in there now. And not one of you middle-class well-meaning types either.”
“I thought that was the point. The workers get rich, send their kids to college, and give them a social conscience.”
“Forget it. We live in a classless society, remember? Social mobility. The ruling class lets a couple of workers’ kids win the lottery and this lets them grind the faces of the poor with impunity. ‘Hey, they had their chance at the gold ring and they muffed it, so fuck ’em.’ Some chance! So the kids go to college, and start working, and they get some money, and have some nice things, they learn how to dress, and talk nice, and before you know it, they’re voting Republican.”
“That’s progress,” said Karp with a smile.
“Pish on progress, then! Yeah, it’s progress if you win the lottery; everyone else can rot in trailer parks on a minimum wage that wouldn’t support a family even if both parents work full-time.”
Their food arrived, sandwiches thick as dictionaries, and Dr. Brown’s Cel-Ray, in cans, instead of the beautiful brown bottles it used to come in. Sterner took a big bite of his and continued to talk around the wad. “And so everything is fine and dandy, we say. Better than Russia, yeah, but that’s some better! The problem is the public is too insulated now.”
“How do you mean, insulated?”
“From the concrete realities. Think about it. Take a look around this place.” Sterner made a broad gesture. “Every single object you see except the human bodies—all the clothes, the shoes, the tables, the plates, the silverware, the floor tiles, this corned beef sandwich, which by the way is cold in the middle, the patzers used a microwave, and this is not real Jewish rye either—ev-er-y-thing, was made at some stage by a worker using his body, and not only using his body, using up his body. And probably none of the people in this restaurant have a single friend who does that. See, that’s the difference between us and them. They consume themselves making the world we live in; they’re less every year, just like piles of coal. And they deserve better than what we give them, which by and large is bubkes.” He put the sandwich down and examined Karp closely. “What, you’re not impressed by my argument?”
“I’m always impressed by your argument. But what’s the alternative to what we got now? Socialism? Great idea, doesn’t work.”
Sterner frowned and extended his jaw like the ram on a trireme. “Listen, do me a favor and don’t talk to me about socialism, because you don’t know what you’re talking about. When anyone says the S-word, you’ve been trained to think, ‘Ugh, Stalin!’ You think I’m talking that shit? I spent years fighting Stalinists, and I mean literally sometimes, with this”—again the fist held up—“but I will say one thing for that shithead, for the Soviet Union, their one good deed: They scared the bejesus out of the plutocrats, which was why they let Roosevelt save capitalism, and why they finally legalized unions. Unfortunately, the Reds were too far away to scare our plutocrats enough, which is why we’re the only industrial democracy with no real social democratic party. I except the Japanese; who the hell can figure them out? And when the Cold War started, our marvelous union leaders kicked out everyone who had any tinge of socialist leanings, leaving what? Gangsters and turtles. Ostriches! The result? Unions are down to, I don’t know, 11 percent of the labor force? The Chinese make half our consumer goods in their sweat-shops and two-thirds of our country has no unions at all. That’s why Red Heeney was important.”
“I was wondering when you’d get back to him,” Karp said. “I take it he wasn’t called Red just because of his hair.”
“No, like I said, he was a true believer. And I’m not going to let them get away with it.”
“What’s your involvement?”
A sly smile here, a waggle of the hand. “Eh, you know, some phone calls. I’m a kibitzer now. I make suggestions.”
“I thought you were a mover and shaker.”
“Please. That was years ago. You want some cheesecake? On second thought, they probably ship it in from Korea. What I did do was, I called Roy Orne. A good guy. I knew his dad from the CIO days, a coal union man. So we talked, and he wants to handle it on the state level, but quick and quiet. I said I’d get back to him with some names.”
“Wait a second, Saul, slow down. Who’s Roy Orne?”
“What, you still don’t read anything but the sports pages?”
“And the crimes,” said Karp. “Who is he?”
“Dumbbell! He’s the governor of West Virginia, that’s who! Look, here’s the situation. Robbens County, where the murders took place, is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Majestic Coal Company. Not only does the company own the union, it owns the district judge, the sheriff, most of the land, all the mineral rights, the congressman, and at least one U.S. senator. This has been going on for eighty years. Clarkesville, PA, was a rough and dirty town, but Clarkesville is Scarsdale compared to Robbens County. It’s in a class by itself. You know anything about the history?”
“Not a thing, except what I gathered from Heeney and his wife. Union troubles?”
“More like a war. The first thing you have to know is that whe
n coal got big, back in the 1880s, all the way through to the 1920s, West Virginia had the worst mine safety record of any state. They were able to keep the UMW out of the state until 1902, and even after that, there were whole chunks of it that organizers just couldn’t get to. Organizers were arrested as a matter of course, and beaten, all over the state, but in Robbens they were just shot, bang, and sometimes their families, too. Okay, World War One there was a boom in coal, and after the war the operators laid off the miners they’d hired and cut wages. The UMW targeted three counties in southern West Virginia as its top priority—Mingo, Logan, and Robbens. There was a full-scale war in Mingo County. The operators brought in thugs, the so-called detective agencies, the miners armed themselves, dozens of people got shot. Then a couple of miners going to a trial on trumped-up murder charges were assassinated on the steps of the courthouse by company dicks. The miners went crazy. They took hostages. The mine owners and their political allies called in the National Guard—machine guns, tanks. Airplanes dropped bombs on the miners’ camps. This is in America, remember. Finally, President Harding, the old fascist, sent in federal troops and the miners surrendered. That was the end of the war and the organizing drive. The coalfields didn’t get unions until the New Deal came in. You knew any of this?”
“Some. And I assume the same thing happened in Robbens.”
“You would assume wrong. Majestic had two advantages in Robbens: one, they owned the whole thing, all the coal patches. Two, they didn’t bring in outside detectives. They used locals, and the locals were a lot worse than the goons. What they did was they fomented a civil war, based on existing feuds. Everyone in those parts has a connection to one of two families. You’re either a Cade or a Jonson. Majestic hired Cades to kill Jonsons and Jonsons to kill Cades, and of course, anyone came in from outside got killed just on general principles. They set up a phony union, the Independent Mine Workers, so that by the time the feds got around to investigating, they had everything nailed down. There’s no local law enforcement to speak of. This is like Latin America, no difference.”
Absolute Rage Page 14
