“Where?”
“Oh, you know what I mean.”
Every big campaign had its distinct web of financing, much of it legal and reportable, but some of it not quite legal or from contributors who would rather remain nameless or who the candidate preferred not to be associated with in public. “She decided not to tell anyone?” Peter asked.
“Well, I expect she wanted to stay with her young man and didn’t say nothin’ about who was comin’ and who was goin’.”
By instinct he slowed his thinking; she had only given him shadows of facts, nothing substantial, nothing he could have corroborated. “You’re saying—let me be sure I understand this—Johnetta knew something about the Mayor’s campaign, she knew about some particular people who gave money?”
The woman clucked in impatience at his white man’s stupidity, and her anger at him released her deeper outrage: “What I’m tryin’ to get said to you is that gal knew she had found a good man and they was in love, but the family was too high and mighty and they thought she was a trashy nigger from North Philadelphia when they was longtime business people—huh!—and they saw she knew about certain things. They always preachin’ about co-muni-ty, but them people don’t care nothin’ about nobody, exceptin’ they own. Now, I can see some of their worry, if you want to know the truth. She had a mouth on her, I admit it, and—Praise God! Oh, praise God!” She stared at the window outside, rose out of her seat, and moved surprisingly quickly to the door. “Tyler!”
Peter turned in his seat. A black man, his face hidden behind sunglasses and hat, was holding a boy of about three under his arm like a bag of laundry. The boy was packed into a snowsuit and knitted cap, and cried tentatively at the sight of his great-grandmother. The man pointed to the boy and beckoned fiercely to Mrs. Banks as she exited the restaurant.
“Mrs. Banks!” Peter called. “Wait!”
Peter followed and flung himself toward the door, but not before another black man leapt in front of it. At the same time, the man in sunglasses hurried the old woman and child around the corner. Peter shoved with all his might, from the knees and thighs. The door did not move. The cold glass was heavily fogged from the heat of the restaurant and he couldn’t see through it well. He swiped at the glass and pressed his eye to the cleared spot. On the other side of the door—six inches away—was the face of the second man, expressionless and yet—in the eyes and around the dry, pressed lips—sadder than any face Peter had ever seen. His eyebrows were broken by long-healed gashes and beatings, the nose long ago punched in. Below the man’s mouth arched a thin, dark scar—an absurd smile of damaged tissue. The man checked to see that the others were gone, looked back at the solitary eye staring at him through the fogged glass, and silently shook his head: Don’t mess with me, the man’s sad eyes said, the gray moons beneath them testifying to unutterable sufferings endured and, perhaps, inflicted. In this face was the deadened quality of one who has been furious for a lifetime. Then, as if yanked backward by an unseen hand, the man leapt away from the door. Peter stumbled into the street. He tried to give chase. The man slipped through the crowd of midday shoppers and was gone.
“HEY, MISTAH SCATTER-GOD, I gotta show you something.”
Back in his office, Peter looked up from his desk, where he’d written down all he remembered about what had just happened with Mrs. Banks. There was no quick way of judging the worth or truth of what she’d said. Here was Berger, carrying a stack of files.
“I saw Stein over in court at a pretrial,” Berger began, wiping his hands over his scalp. “You have to hand it to him, he takes the cases no one wants. He was defending some guy who shot at a crack dealer for not getting exact change.”
“Exact change?”
Berger tossed his files on the desk.
“This guy’s from Chester. Drives up twice a week to buy coke at the Dewitt Park housing project. Not that he can’t get it in his own neighborhood, of course. This is a total bullshit case. Pisses me off, for once—”
“What about Stein?”
“Well, what I’m going to tell you will interest you, but first I got to tell you this story.” Berger ran his thumbnail along the cracks separating his teeth. “This guy bombs up to the projects twice a week. He comes into the city because the coke’s better and because he’s got some girlfriend in the neighborhood. Makes you fuck better, cocaine. Five times in an hour, etcetera, etcetera. Not that I would know, of course.”
“Of course,” Peter answered pointedly.
“What’s that mean?” Berger said.
“I mean, pal, that some ass-wipe detective I talked to a couple of days ago asked me about your recreational use of pharmaceutical substances.”
Berger rotated his head toward the door and gave it a soft nudge with his toe until it shut. “Okay, Peter. That’s over with. Done. It’s been a problem but no more, and I don’t want to discuss it.”
The small room was silent. The police were routinely tested for drug use. Those who refused to be tested could be fired. Berger frowned at Peter, waiting for his reaction.
“I owe you a hell of a lot, Bergs. I want—”
“You don’t owe me a speech, Peter. I can’t take one of your moralizing speeches. Save it for the jury. It works better on them anyway.”
“Fine.” Peter shook his head in disgust.
“If I’m a hypocrite, just let me be one, all right?”
Berger gripped the edge of the desk with both hands and stared right at him; the man was plainly terrified.
“Suit yourself,” Peter declared.
“If I’m going to fuck myself up, which I’m not, just let me do it without—”
“Fine,” Peter snarled.
The room was quiet while the two men hated each other for caring so much. On the other side of the wall somewhere, a phone trilled.
“Tell me about this dealer,” Peter said finally.
Berger slowly came back to life. “All right, this guy drives around in his car. Duded up with smoked glass, fog lights, initials on the door. This guy is a real stud, right? Roll down the window, get the stuff, pick up the girlfriend, have a time, right? Got it figured down to the last dollar. He doesn’t make that much, but what he does make he spends carefully.” Berger was into the role, shaking his head, jiving and shucking. “Got to have the best, yeah, motherfuckah. So he drives into the projects and they’ve got all these spotters and checkers and guys with radios and pagers and stuff. The neighbors say they see Jersey and New York plates around there, all the time, even Connecticut, Virginia. You know, these kids with about eight thousand dollars’ worth of gold rope around their necks. And the earrings shaped like dollar signs. So the guy drives in. They wave him in and he makes the buy. He has a .45 under the seat. Turns out the kid selling doesn’t have change for a fifty. Can’t leave his post, there’s too much business. The guy in the car either takes the junk and not get like three bucks back in change, or forgets the whole deal. These kids are getting used to dealing with hundred-dollar bills. Probably a status thing not to have little piddly-shit change like fives and tens. So this guy blows his top and pulls out a gun, takes a shot. He’s got fucking dum-dums in there—”
“Exploding bullets?” Peter reacted, with a sense of doom.
“Yeah. Not even serious about it, figures he’s bought a shot. I mean, if he picked off the dealer, maybe there’d be some sort of sick justice in all this, right? Well, no. He just squeezes one off, half-assed. The gun’s heavy and he still has his left hand on the steering wheel. The dealer’s running away from the car. It misses, goes through a window forty yards away. Forty yards! This twenty-eight-year-old mother of three is warming baby food. Her baby is sick. And her mother is a cripple with high blood pressure and this woman takes care of her, she’s a fucking saint. We have a picture of how the pots were on the stove. Her kid’s next to her. The bullet doesn’t hit anything—not a tree, not a windowsill, nothing. Goes through the open first-floor window and boom! right in the neck. Practically fuck
ing decapitated her. The oldest kid is standing there and sees the whole thing. The woman died in less than a minute. The kids are in a temporary foster, the old grandmother is in the hospital, the whole bucket of shit.”
“Never’ll go to trial.”
Berger nodded in agreement. “I offered seven and second-degree. He’ll probably take it. This is the kind of shit case that brings out the fascist in me, Peter. Prison is expensive. Nobody wants to pay thirty thousand a year of taxpayers’ money for these guys. Hell, why not just round them all up, take them to the edge of a cliff, and blow their brains out and kick them over? The total number of casualties would be lower if that happened. You can call me any name you like, a Nazi-racist-fascist asshole, but I think the world would be a better place.”
They both knew Berger didn’t believe that. Though, on second thought, maybe he did, with the blind fervor of one who must burn off his guilt. The whole picture was much more complicated than blaming the dealers. It was guys like Berger who helped to keep them in business. And it was the nation’s unwinnable war on drugs that made the price of drugs so high, thereby eliciting on the streets the violence over the profits.
“You feeling better now?” Peter didn’t hide his disgust.
“No, and fuck you, too.”
“What about Stein?” Peter asked.
Berger sighed, the tempest done. “He knows you and me are friends. He comes up to me and says that strictly unofficially he wants you to meet with him and Carothers soon. I said when and he said as soon as—he worried about his client’s safety. Just you and me, too, if you need backup. Says he knows you’re a good egg, that you don’t dick over defense counsel. I said, he’s just never been caught.”
“Ha,” Peter said in a dry voice.
“I just wanted to scare him a little. So he says that he doesn’t want Hoskins in on this. I said, are you crazy, I can’t guarantee anything. We don’t do that kind of thing, even if we wanted to. Everything’s above board. We follow procedure, etcetera, etcetera. He says he knows that. He says he’s appealing to my higher instincts. I’m a sucker for those higher instincts, let me tell you. Okay. So I say, look, if there’s something you think Peter should know, something you want to negotiate, there’s no harm in that. He says he knows when Hoskins is over at the Union League for lunch every week, has been for ten years. I said fine, you could bring your man up at noon for forty-five minutes. He said why can’t you guys come out to the prison and I said no way.”
“We don’t have the time.”
“Of course.”
“Has to appear harmless. Has to be harmless.”
“Right. Just bring him up for forty-five and get him out again. I told him you’d call. I thought he could meet us in the conference room on the eighth floor. Skip the seventh floor entirely. Christ, it’s lunch, everybody’s out. We’ll ask a few questions about the armed robbery, whatever. Hoskins will pick up on it sooner or later, but I say you could take that chance.”
“Did they get through the hearing?”
“No, the room never turned over. Judge Kravetz is behind.”
Berger had taken a risk by being the intermediary. But Berger liked risks—that’s why he was a coke addict.
“Should I call Stein right now?” Peter asked.
Berger’s eyes glazed and he took short, shallow breaths. This was how he did his best thinking. “No. Not yet. Give it a little time, let the pressure build. Let him call you.”
“You do know there’s something fucked about this case,” Peter said in a quieter voice. He wouldn’t mention Mrs. Banks. He didn’t know if he still trusted Berger. “Don’t you?”
“Of course.”
“I haven’t figured it out.”
“You will,” Berger said, looking at Peter. “Want to tell me what you were writing about when I came in?”
“It’s nothing,” Peter said.
“You lost faith in me?”
“Not as a lawyer.”
AFTER LUNCH, Mastrude wanted him to sign some papers. The secretary waved him in.
“What do you hear from Janice?”
Mastrude’s fingers fluttered on his belly as he sat back in his chair.
“Your wife’s lawyer has filed for a legal separation. He also informed me this morning of Janice’s terms of the divorce. Seems your wife is taking the high road, Peter.”
“What do you mean?”
“She wants very, very little.”
“She wanted a hell of lot when we still lived in the same house.”
“No more.”
This bothered him. Mastrude nodded, indicating he understood the psychology behind Janice’s stand. “She’s making it very easy on you. She wants this thing to be as smooth as possible, according to her lawyer, so smooth she’s willing to cede a lot of ground.”
“Hell, if we get divorced, I want her to be well situated—”
“She’s not going to let you buy off your feelings of guilt.”
“That’s a bullshit position, you know that,” he snapped.
“A lot of guys would think you were a fool. But of course you want to see that she’s comfortable.”
“By not taking anything, she’s saying—”
He stopped, not wanting to say it, but Mastrude finished his thought: “She’s saying there’s nothing from the marriage she wants to take with her.”
Well, he couldn’t blame Janice. If she’d lured him into her bedroom and he’d found John Apple lying in bed with a hard-on and smoking a cigarette—the factual equivalent to Cassandra’s presence—then he’d have plenty of hate for Janice, too, the kind of blind hate that distorted all information into fuel for anger. But Mastrude was wrong. Janice’s denial of whatever he might be able to provide was not the high road, it was the fuck-you road, the malice-aforethought, you-goddamn-bastard road.
“Could she be getting money from anywhere?” Mastrude asked.
“I don’t think so. She hasn’t any family left. There’s a father who might live in Idaho in a trailer or somewhere.” Another messy end, and perhaps Peter was just one in a series. “Nobody’s heard from him in over ten years.”
“Friends?”
“Her friends could help her out temporarily, but not in any long-term way.”
“People in need don’t usually reject financial assistance unless they have it coming from another source—that’s my experience.” Mastrude shrugged. “Righteousness is likeliest when it’s affordable.”
“I’m not surprised by her.”
“That shows your inability to explain her behavior.” Mastrude winked. “Do you think she’s going into private practice?”
Peter looked toward the window, his mind struggling to find some small moment of grace, the kind of perspective one was supposed to acquire as one aged. He couldn’t do it. “She’d have to disengage from the women’s shelter, which I doubt she would do now since it gives her a community of people. And she’s deep into a new project. Plus she’d also have to borrow first to set up a practice.”
“Maybe she’s making more where she works,” Mastrude suggested.
He was familiar with the funding of the shelter; for years he had heard about its finances, and he’d often given Janice some general legal advice. “They operate on almost nothing, really—grants, state funding, a few contributions.”
“Is she frugal enough to cut off your support?”
The answer was yes, and it made him sad to think of her counting every penny. The thrill of independence would wear off.
“Janice has been on her own since sixteen,” Peter finally said quietly. “She’s a survivor.”
“Nope, can’t buy that. A professional woman at thirty has different needs than a teenager,” Mastrude insisted, “so I’m going to say it again—is there any other possible source of money for her?”
“I honestly can’t think of any.” Though maybe Big Bad John Apple had some cash.
“How shall I respond to her lawyer?”
“Tell him the of
fer of assistance still stands, in a general way, but that I would prefer she and I sit down privately and negotiate.”
“She’s communicating only through the lawyer.”
“In that case, tell him to tell her that should she change her mind, then I’m willing to help.”
Mastrude shook his head again. “No. I’ll just say you understand and accept the terms. If she changes her mind later, which is what you want her to do, then if you have already shown your willingness to provide for her, she might still not take your help—in other words, if you tell her you want to help, then she may not accept it because she will feel like she’s playing into your hand, like she has made no move spontaneously that wasn’t anticipated by you.” Mastrude’s eyebrows lifted as he waited for Peter’s recognition of what had just been said. “In other words, again, let her provide herself with the belief—or illusion—that she is operating autonomously. It allows her to maintain her self-respect, it allows you some self-respect, and it may get you what you want, too.”
“You seem to have all the answers,” Peter said.
“I have some of them. That’s why you’re paying me.”
“Now I know.” He scowled. “Why do I remain unconvinced?”
Mastrude knocked his knuckles together as if he were reducing many words to an important few. “If I told you, it wouldn’t help.”
Little match heads of stomach acid ignited somewhere under Peter’s breastbone; he was miserable, beyond himself with unhappiness. He’d seen the same in Berger’s face. “Tell me anyway.”
“Nothing is learned that isn’t experienced, including these very words.”
So that was what they had come to. For this he was looting what available cash was left? “The essence of tragedy,” he assumed dully.
“Yes!” Mastrude followed, enthusiastic at the turn in the conversation, away from the dirty details of yet another divorce case. “And there’s a corollary to it: Nothing is believed until one figures out why one didn’t believe it in the first place.”
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