Past Due

by William Lashner

  “Let’s assume that the formalities have been completed,” I said.

  “Grand.” He turned his attention from the cat and stared at me for a long moment. “On the phone you mentioned Tommy Greeley.”

  “Yes,” I said. “Right. I did. I’m trying to learn what I can about what happened to him twenty years ago. I was told that you were his closest friend in both college and law school.”

  “We were friends, yes.”

  “Close friends?”

  “For a time. We were on the fencing team together. But eventually we drifted apart. We had different interests.”

  “Such as?”

  “I’m curious from where this interest in Tommy Greeley arrives. Tell me, Miss Blue, why does your employer care about ancient history?”

  “It’s kind of a long story,” said Kimberly.

  “I have time. I like stories.”

  He scratched the cat’s neck for a long moment and then pushed it off his lap. The cat jumped down and stalked back to the divan. The justice arched his hands on the desk, leaned forward.

  “No story, Miss Blue? What a shame. I took the liberty of looking you up in Martindale-Hubble, Mr. Carl. And I asked around. I hope you don’t mind. It’s not often I get a query about Tommy Greeley. You do criminal work, isn’t that right?”

  “Primarily.”

  “And you have no obvious political affiliations.”

  “Not anymore. I used to take it more seriously but then I stopped seeing the humor in the jokes that kept getting elected.”

  “Including me?”

  “I wouldn’t presume—”

  “But you just did. So, if this isn’t a cause of the heart, then you are a hired gun, isn’t that right, Mr. Carl?”

  “That’s what a lawyer is, Mr. Justice.”

  “And so who has done the hiring? Which organization has asked you to dig into my past.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Oh, let’s treat it like a game. Let me guess. Is it the ACLU? Or is it perhaps the AFL-CIO? Or maybe the NAACP? What about the ADL? That might be up your alley. Or the AARP? Greenpeace? The Sierra Club? Have you gone to work for the UFW or the Teamsters? Public Citizen? Common Cause? Corporate Watch? The National Gay and Lesbian Task Force? Americans United for Affirmative Action? Or maybe the harridans at NOW? Is that it, Miss Blue, are you an aspiring Gloria Steinem? Which of the instruments of the left have hired you as their Torquemada, Mr. Carl?”

  “I think you have a wrong—”

  “Isn’t it a little unseemly to wallow in the mire of the distant past in order to scuttle a nomination while the nine Justices in Washington are still hale and hearty?”

  “I have no intention of—”

  “You should be made aware, Mr. Carl, that I will not sit idly by while you attempt to ruin my reputation. I am not without means. The great right wing conspiracy almost took down a president. Think of what it can do to a milquetoast like you.”

  “You are under a misapprehension, Mr. Justice.”

  He tilted his head, surprised, I think, at the amusement that I let twist the edges of my mouth. “Then educate me, Mr. Carl.”

  “This might shock you, Mr. Justice, but I don’t give a whit about your chances to rise to the U.S. Supreme Court. I’m like the rest of America, more concerned with my own bowel movements than the lofty progress of your career. But I had hoped you’d be able to tell me about Tommy Greeley’s college life, his other friends, his girlfriend. I had hoped you’d be able to help me figure out what happened to him in the end. In fact, being a friend, I expected you’d be anxious to help. But we come here in good faith and suddenly you give us the third degree and start laying on threats. Now is that polite, Mr. Justice?”

  “What do you want?”

  “I want to know who set up Tommy Greeley’s murder?”

  “We don’t know Tommy was murdered,” said the justice. “He only disappeared. He might have run away.”

  “He was murdered.”

  “Have they found his body?”

  “No.”

  “Then how are you so sure?”

  “One of the killers told me.”

  “Jesus, God. Who?”

  “He’s dead also, Mr. Justice, his throat slashed and his body dumped beside a shipping container on one of the piers along the riverfront.”

  The justice’s face tightened and grew more lopsided. “When was this?”

  “A few weeks ago.”

  “Why?”

  “The police don’t yet know. It could be anything. But twenty years ago he had been hired to beat up Tommy Greeley. He got carried away. That’s why Tommy disappeared. The man with the slit throat was a client of mine; I’m now representing his mother in a wrongful death action. To that end, I’m trying to learn who hired him to beat up your friend Tommy Greeley in the first place.”

  The justice stood from his desk, placed his arms behind his back, and strolled around me toward the shelves above the divan. He reached for the fencing trophy, held it with one hand as he tested the tip of the statuette’s foil with his thumb.

  “Do you remember a nominee to the court named Douglas Ginsburg,” he said. “A stellar judge, nominated by Reagan. Reports came out that, while a professor at Harvard, he was at parties where marihuana was smoked. Can you imagine parties at Harvard where marihuana wasn’t smoked in those days? Still, it was enough to scuttle his nomination.”

  “And that’s the danger for you represented by Tommy Greeley?”

  “He was my friend. He was a drug dealer. It won’t take much for the Neanderthals on the left, sitting back stoned on their couches, to make their insinuations.”

  Even as he said it I thought of an organization the justice missed in his litany of opponents, TPAC, the Telushkin Political Action Committee, membership one. I could see him now, Jeffrey Telushkin, sitting on his chair, clapping his hands with glee as I sat here asking Jackson Straczynski about his former friend, now dead, who might be used to sully his reputation and sink his chance for the big seat. The image turned my stomach.

  “I really am not here to hurt you or your chances, Mr. Justice. I just want to learn what you can tell me about Tommy.”

  “I entered college in the seventies,” he said, without the venom his voice had carried before. “Drugs were everywhere, at every party, in every dormitory hallway. It was impossible to avoid, and many had no desire to avoid it. Tommy Greeley was one of those. We both went out for the fencing team. I liked him from the first. He was smart, rebellious, entrepreneurial, an innovative young man and a brilliant fencer. We both started with the sport at Penn, were well behind the rest who had fenced in prep school, but Tommy was a natural. Other than fencing, I was interested in art, literature, culture. I was something of an aesthete. Dorian Gray. An embarrassment now, but the way it was. Tommy, other than fencing, was like the rest of my generation, interested only in getting high and getting laid. I told you we had divergent interests. That was where we diverged.”

  “You didn’t use drugs at all?” said Kimberly.

  “What’s next, Miss Blue, boxers or briefs? Let’s just say it is an improper question and leave it at that. I won’t answer it here, or in the Senate if I get the opportunity. But I will tell you this. I had a younger brother named Benjamin who lost his way. Speed turned him crazy, truly, and his craziness got him killed. I saw first hand with my brother a drug’s insidious power to destroy.”

  “When did Tommy start selling?” I said.

  “Early on. At first it was only marihuana, just enough to keep himself supplied. Then he fell into a crowd that was selling more and, with his entrepreneurial bent, he quickly took it over. He teamed up with a man, short and thick with a scarred face—Prod I think his name was, Cooper Prod—and together they began selling far beyond the confines of the university. This was now his junior year or so. I met my wife at about the same time, fell deeply in love, moved off campus to live with her. Eventually, even before I graduated, we married. But Tommy had
found something perfectly suited to his talents. And even as he ran his enterprise, he still received excellent grades, enough to get him into law school. Later, during law school, I heard he had moved up to cocaine. Less product, more profit. There were even a few law students who had gone in with him. But by then I had pretty much cut him out of my life, for understandable reasons. Occasionally we would have dinner, the four of us, talk about law school, our futures. But he never mentioned his business and I never let him. He knew what was happening to my brother, knew how I felt about it. That was it, the extent of our relationship.”

  “You said the four of us.”

  “My wife and I. Tommy and his girlfriend, Sylvia. Sylvia Steinberg.”

  “Was Tommy seeing anyone other than this Sylvia?”

  “Why?”

  “The police report on the missing persons complaint filed by Mrs. Greeley seemed to indicate that he and Ms. Steinberg had broken up.”

  “All I knew for certain was Sylvia. But it was a difficult time. There was an FBI investigation, there were indictments. It was a huge scandal at the law school. The people he was working with, they all went to jail. When he disappeared we figured he had run away from everything.”

  “Do you have any idea why anyone might have wanted Tommy hurt or killed?”

  He put the fencing trophy back on the shelf but didn’t turn around to face us. And as he spoke the following words, his sharp voice grew sharper and his tall elegant frame seemed to contract upon itself, to deform itself, to hunch itself into a taut knot.

  “The truth is, he was dealing with dangerous people, Mr. Carl. Maybe he didn’t know how dangerous. He was greedy, he always wanted more. He had made hundreds of thousands of dollars selling his poison, he had a beautiful girlfriend, he had the whole world at his feet, but it wasn’t enough. Tommy Greeley was hungry, ravenous, he wanted everything he could lay his grasping little hands upon and finally he took too much and paid the price.”

  “Too much of what?” I said.

  But before he could answer the door burst open and a green-eyed woman stepped into the office, stuck out her hip, flung her arms up to the sky like a showgirl jumping out of a cake. She was tall and slim, energetic, she was dressed like a gypsy with hoop earrings and a bandanna over her hair. Red gloves came down to her elbows, her frilly skirt came down to her ankles. In one raised hand was a bottle of champagne, in the other were two champagne flutes.

  “Darling,” she said. “I have wondrous news. We simply must celebrate.”

  I recognized her. She was the woman with the shy smile whose picture was in the slate frame, older now by a couple decades, but still her smile was bright, her face was all glittering angles, her eyes so glowed with vivacity and spirit it was as if she vibrated with some fierce energy. The proprietary way she stood in the doorway, the way she perfectly matched the exotic decor, stated without a doubt that she was the justice’s wife. But as he turned to her, still in that strange hunched posture, as he turned to gaze, startled, at his wife, his face held not the arrogance it had showed to us, or the bored, overfamiliar visage of the long married. No, as if one of the masks on his shelf had been pulled from his features to show the reality behind, his face was seething with emotion. There was passion, there was fascination and fear and disgust. And most of all there was love, pure and painful, innocent and imprisoning, a love that was strangely sad, perversely lonely, and absolutely abject.

  His expression recovered quickly, the mask was replaced, the swirl of emotions that had flooded his features for a brief second disappeared as suddenly as it had come. And it was only later that I began to wonder if maybe, just maybe, in the powerful stream of emotions that hunched the justice’s posture and distorted his features, there lay not just a glimpse into the painful depths of a troubled marriage but also the seeds of a motive that might have cost Tommy Greeley and, yes, Joey Parma their lives.

  Chapter

  25

  WHATEVER WATERS I had expected to roil by my visit to a State Supreme Court justice, they didn’t take long to splash back into my face.

  “That judge’s wife was so hitting on you, V,” said Kimberly, as we walked back to my office after our meeting with the justice.

  “Don’t be ridiculous.”

  “Oh, please. The way she was going, ‘Victor, Victor, darling,’ the way she insisted you stay for champagne, the way she laughed uproariously at all your jokes.”

  “They were good jokes,” I said.

  “Lame, V. They were tripping over their crutches. But she was laughing and fawning all over you like you were some Chippendale. And you were all, ‘Oh, Mrs. Straczynski’ this and ‘Oh, Mrs. Straczynski’ that and she was all, ‘Call me Alura, darling.’ It was a brutal display, V. Really. I was embarrassed for you.”

  Kimberly was right that Alura Straczynski had been inappropriately flirtatious with me, but she was wrong that I had liked it. It more than made me wildly uncomfortable, it gave me the skives. The judge’s clerk, Curtis Lobban, had been invited to join the little party and he had stood in the corner the whole time, staring at me with his piercing gaze of flat contempt. And worse, as the justice’s wife leaned toward me and touched her throat, the justice himself was watching, carefully, with utter control, his face again a mask without an ounce of emotion.

  “But did you believe what he told us?” she said.

  “Yes, about not being part of the drug business, at least. His ambitions, even then, were too large to risk on something as stupid as dealing cocaine, no matter how lucrative, and the FBI was never able to link him to the organization. But I sensed that his connection to Tommy had been stronger than he let on and that there was some unfinished business.”

  “About what?”

  “That’s the question, isn’t it?”

  “Well, he was lying about one thing,” said Kimberly.

  “Really?”

  “He said he didn’t watch television.”

  “Maybe he doesn’t,”

  “Oh yes, he does,” she said. “He went all Evita on us when he said it, like he was better than the rest of the world because he didn’t vegetate in front of the tube. But he watches, when the wife’s away playing her games, he watches, yes he does. And the bad stuff too.”

  Just then we turned the corner and saw the suit. He was standing at the front door to my building, just under the big sign of the shoe. The man had a name, but the name wasn’t important, just the suit and the haircut and the way he pushed himself off the wall when he saw me, the way he flashed his credentials with a flip of the wrist.

  “I’m supposed to walk you to the District Attorney’s office, Mr. Carl,” he said.

  “What if I’m busy?”

  “I was told you’re not that busy.”

  “What if I refused, sat right down on the sidewalk, and sang ‘Freebird’ at the top of my lungs?”

  “Then I’d have to have you arrested, Mr. Carl.”

  “On what charge?”

  “Singing Lynyrd Skynyrd without a shred of talent.”

  “Fair enough. Should I bring a toothbrush?”

  “Prudence might suggest so,” he said.

  “Let’s leave her the hell out of it, shall we?”

  “Are you finished trying to be clever, Mr. Carl?”

  “Trying, huh? They hire you right out of law school?”

  “Yes, they did.”

  “Where’d you go?”

  “Harvard.”

  “Three years of Harvard and this is what they have you doing?”

  “I’m so proud I could burst.”

  “Okay, I’m yours. Lead on Macduff.”

  “The name’s Berenson.”

  “And don’t you forget it,” I said, even as I gave Kimberly a shrug and then let Berenson lead me back the way I had come, back to a dressing down at the DA’s office, where I’d be lucky if I was left, by the end of it, with even my boxers.

  Chapter

  26

  THE NINE BLOCKS between my shabby
office and the District Attorney’s shabby offices were familiar ones. I had made that walk hundreds of times, knew every storefront deli between here and there, so the suit hadn’t been sent to make sure I didn’t get lost. And he hadn’t been sent to make sure I showed, a polite phone call would have done as much. I’m a polite guy, you’re polite with me, I’m polite with you, everything can be oh so polite. And that was the point, I understood perfectly, of the suit.

  The DA’s offices were in an old YMCA, and I could still smell the sweat oozing out of the finely carved wood in the lobby. The suit used his magnetic card to open the glass door, signed me in, slapped a visitor sticker on my lapel, took me into the elevator, led me down the hallway of the seventh floor. He walked past the secretary, sitting at her station, and opened the door for me. I stopped at the secretary’s desk.

  “Hello, Debbie,” I said.

  “Hello, Mr. Carl.”

  “Have you done something different with your hair?”

  “Yes, as a matter of fact.”

  “It is very becoming,” I said.

  “Thank you for noticing. That is so nice.”

  “See,” I said to the suit still standing at the door. “I can be polite. I really can.”

  Funny, he didn’t seem to care.

  “Is that Carl I hear out there, Berenson?” came a weary voice from the other side of the door.

  “Yes, sir,” said the suit.

  “Then will you politely ask that bastard to step inside and close the door behind him.”

  K. Lawrence Slocum, chief of the DA’s homicide unit, was sitting at his desk, shirtsleeves rolled up to his forearms, his glasses off, his fingers rubbing at his eyes so insistently it was like he was rubbing at an instant play lottery card in search of a jackpot. No luck there, for when he stopped his rubbing, put his thick glasses back on, peered through the lenses and across his desktop, he was peering at me. K. Lawrence Slocum had broad shoulders, thick forearms, and a grizzled jaw. He was a sweetheart, really, so long as you didn’t cross him. But just now, he stared at me like I was something odor-iferous he had just scraped off his shoe.