Trophy Widow

by Michael A. Kahn

  Six months ago, though, the storm clouds known as Renewal 2004 began gathering. That’s when Sheila retained me as the attorney for the shelter. Today would be our third meeting with Nate the Great in an effort to avoid a head-on collision between Renewal 2004 and the Oasis Shelter.

  Sheila was also my connection to Angela Green. They’d become good friends while serving together on the Oasis board, and their relationship had survived the trial and Angela’s incarceration. When Angela needed a civil lawyer to defend her in the Son of Sam case, she turned to Sheila for advice, and Sheila gave her my name.

  “By the way,” I said as we waited for the elevator, “Angela knows Nate the Great.”

  “Really?” Sheila said, intrigued. “How?”

  “She once baby-sat for him. She told me they grew up in the same neighborhood. He was a few years behind her younger sister at Soldan High.”

  “What did her sister think of him?”

  “Not much. She said he was one of those slick Casanova types, dressing real fine, checking himself in every mirror, always patting and fiddling with his Afro.”

  Sheila smiled. “Nate with an Afro. Now there’s an image.”

  “Actually,” I said, grinning, “I have a better image. It’s a story Angela told me about Nate.”

  “What?”

  “Back when Angela was in college, Nate’s mother hired her one summer to baby-sit for Nate and his younger sister while she was out of town. Nate was twelve years old, and his sister was eight. Angela took her to the zoo one day. When she came home that afternoon she caught Nate on his bed with some of her bras and underwear and a pair of her high heels.”

  “Oh, my God,” Sheila said, giggling and covering her mouth. “Was he…you know?”

  “Probably. He must have heard her coming down the hall because when she walked in on him he had a towel wrapped around his waist.”

  “What did she do?”

  “She slapped him in the face and called him a pervert and told him if he ever misbehaved she’d tell everyone in the neighborhood what he was really like.”

  “Oh, my.”

  “I don’t think he learned his lesson. From what I hear, he still spends his free time trying to get into other women’s pants.”

  “It’s so disgusting. I was at a fund-raiser last year, and he was, too. He acts like he’s God’s gift to women.”

  “Maybe we can convince him to be God’s gift to the women in our shelter.”

  Have a seat,” the secretary informed us in a bored tone, barely looking up, the phone cradled in the crook of her neck. She had iridescent fingernails the size of vulture talons. “The commissioner will be with you soon.” She swiveled away from us and resumed her telephone conversation. “So, then he goes, ‘Girl, don’t be talkin’ ‘bout what…’”

  I wandered along the back wall of the reception area, studying the framed photographs of the city’s flamboyant redevelopment commissioner posed with various visiting dignitaries—Nate the Great shaking hands with Donald Trump; standing next to Sammy Sosa, both of them wearing Chicago Cubs hats; embracing Colin Powell; giving a thumbs-up to the Pope, who looked baffled; grinning alongside President Bill Clinton, the two of them flanked by a pair of St. Louis Rams cheerleaders.

  “Ah, welcome, ladies.”

  I turned to see Nate beaming at us from the doorway of his office.

  Sheila stood. “Good morning, Commissioner.”

  “Sheila, my dear.” He stepped to the side and with a sweeping gesture toward his office said, “Please come in, ladies.”

  He followed us into his office, where a familiar, perennial figure stood by the picture window.

  Nate said, “I believe you ladies have already made the acquaintance of my assistant, Herman Borghoff.”

  Borghoff turned to gaze at us, expressionless, his arms crossed over his chest.

  Although both men were in their late forties, Herman Borghoff made such a contrast to his boss that cynics claimed Nate kept him around just to make himself look better. Borghoff was tall and lumpy and pasty-white. His boss was short and lean and jet-black. Borghoff wore thick hornrimmed glasses, an old-fashioned black Timex watch with a faded canvas watchband, and his high school class ring. He had a bad haircut that failed to disguise the cowlicks in his brown hair. His boss had a stylish goatee, a shaved head, tinted aviators, and lots of gold jewelry, including a Piaget watch worth more than my car. Borghoff wore an ill-fitting plaid suit and scuffed black shoes. His boss could have stepped out of the pages of GQ in his chalk-striped double-breasted navy suit, starched blue shirt with white collar, elegant silk patterned tie, and shiny black alligator shoes. The contrast remained in their lifestyles as well. Borghoff drove a late-model Chevy, lived with his mother, and rarely was seen outside of City Hall. Nate the Great cruised around town in a gleaming black Jaguar XJ8 and appeared at public functions with an ever-changing procession of gorgeous women of all races and ethnic origins. Never married, Nate made St. Louis Magazine’s “Most Eligible Bachelor” list every year.

  To me, their eyes were perhaps their biggest contrast. Borghoff’s were inert. Staring into them—as I had done on several occasions—was like staring at two gray pebbles. Nate’s were dazzling and manic, darting from face to face, sizing you up in an instant, moving on, zooming in, zooming out. Nate’s eyes kept me on guard. Borghoff’s gave me the creeps.

  Borghoff moved off to the side wall, where there was a chair with a legal pad on it. He lifted the pad and settled into the seat as his boss slid into the high-back leather chair behind his imposing desk.

  Nate smiled at us. “Sheila, always a pleasure and a privilege to see you, my dear. Rachel Gold, you are looking fine today, girl, yes you are. Gonna make me have to take some of my blood pressure medication.”

  Typical meaningless jabber from Nate the Great. We’d been tangling over the fate of the Oasis Shelter for more than half a year now, and during that period he’d called me everything from a “stone-cold fox” to a “demon spawn,” from “sexy mama” to “goddamn ball-breaking bitch”—and sometimes all four during the same meeting. He had what charitably could be described as a volatile personality.

  The walls of his office were festooned with even more framed photographs than the reception area, along with various proclamations, letters of commendations, and the like. The enormous picture window behind his desk displayed the Arch in the distance and the Civil Courts Building up close—two impressive edifices unique to St. Louis, although the Civil Courts Building was easily the more intriguing of the two. Hailed in 1930 as the Skyscraper Temple of Law, it’s an otherwise undistinguished fourteen-story limestone structure until you get to the “roof,” which consists of an Ionic Greek temple crowned by an Egyptian pyramid crowned by two enormous griffins, those half-eagle, half-lion creatures of myth. This curiosity is actually a replica of the Tomb of Halicarnassus, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. Why it sits atop the Civil Courts Building is anyone’s guess, but the way it dominated the view from the window added an oddly sinister aura to Nate’s office.

  “So, my lovely ladies,” Nate said, “what’s on your mind today?”

  “Same as last time,” I told him.

  He chuckled and glanced playfully at Borghoff, who stared back without expression.

  Although Nate sometimes assumed the manner of a jester, he was as innocent and harmless as a king cobra—and at least as lethal. After all, his mother was Lucille Turner, which meant that his uncle was the Reverend Orion Sampson, an old-fashioned fire-and-brimstone preacher who’d given up the pulpit thirty years ago to run for Congress. St. Louis had never seen a black politician of his ilk. While others kowtowed to the city’s white power elite, Orion Sampson spent thirty years in Congress thumbing his nose at the white boys while his constituents kept reelecting him with increasingly lopsided votes. The Republicans hadn’t even bothered putting up
a candidate the last four elections. The reverend apparently was as pure and principled as he was self-righteous and arrogant. Three scandal-free decades on Capitol Hill translated into sufficient seniority to chair the types of committees and subcommittees that forced white boys to kowtow to him if they wanted that tax break or federal subsidy or government contract for their Fortune 500 company.

  Orion Sampson dearly loved his older sister Lucille, and Lucille dearly loved her precious son Nathaniel. All of which meant that Nate was not only dangerous but untouchable. He was also the city official in charge of Renewal 2004, the ambitious plan to transform a large section of north St. Louis into an urban environment that would attract middle-class whites back to the city. As redevelopment commissioner, he helped administer the special government-guaranteed mortgages that were the city’s principal tool for implementing the massive redevelopment plan—tens of millions of dollars in redevelopment funds, much of it from the federal government, thanks to Uncle Orion. The properties intended for redevelopment were principally two- and three-flat apartment buildings acquired by the city over the years through tax delinquency seizures, abandonment, or eminent domain proceedings. Indeed, Nate the Great, through his office as redevelopment commissioner, was now the single largest property owner in north St. Louis.

  The target year for completion was 2004, which was the one hundredth anniversary of the St. Louis World’s Fair, which in turn was the one hundredth anniversary of the start of the Lewis and Clark expedition at St. Louis. As part of the redevelopment plan, Nate’s office was attempting to condemn various properties within the area that were deemed to be “inharmonious” with the redevelopment plan. The Oasis Shelter was one such allegedly inharmonious property, which made Nate the Great my principal adversary in the Oasis Shelter condemnation dispute. And now that he’d moved to phase two of Renewal 2004, the battle was heating up.

  “Ladies,” he told us, “I understand your devotion to that shelter, but we’re talking about the future.” He slid into the singsong manner of a preacher. “As we move further into the new millennium we need to expand our perspectives. We have made a commitment to revive a dying portion of this fine city. The sobering reality is that the march of progress often demands the sacrifice of a few to make life better for the many. I am afraid that is the case here.”

  “Come on, Nate,” I said, “you’re not building Disney World out there. You’re talking about revitalizing a real city. Any real city has all types—blacks and whites, Asians and Hispanics, rich and poor, good guys and bad guys, and, unfortunately, some innocent women who are victims of abusive husbands and boyfriends.”

  Nate placed his hands palm-down on the desk and nodded. “I hear you, Rachel. I admire your compassion. But you’re refusing to look at the big picture. We got all types living in this city but one. The one type we don’t have is the white professional class.” He was standing now, turning to gaze out the window at the skyline. “We got to find a way to lure all those white doctors and lawyers and accountants and businessmen back into our fine city.” He turned back to face us. “Let me tell you something, ladies, you don’t bait that hook with a depressing shelter for abused women. Isn’t that the truth, Herman?”

  Borghoff slowly looked up from his notes, his expression impassive, his gaze remote.

  “That’s ridiculous,” I said, pressing on. “We’re not running a crack house, Commissioner. Those are well-maintained apartment buildings, and the cause is a good one.”

  “You’re missing the point, Rachel. I don’t care whether you got the Virgin Mary herself running that operation. My job is to convince Ward and June Cleaver to sell their home out there in the white-bread suburbs, pack up their honky belongings, put Wally and the Beaver in the minivan, and move into the city. I’m never going to close that deal when they find out they’re going to be living next door to a bunch of skanky women hiding out from psycho boyfriends. That just ain’t gonna fly.”

  The meeting went downhill quickly from there and broke up ten minutes later with my assurance to Nate that the shelter’s supporters would be stocking the war chest to fight any condemnation proceeding.

  That just made him chuckle. “You may think you’re messing with City Hall,” he told me, “but you’re forgetting something important, counselor. When it comes to messing, City Hall got a whole lot more ways of messing with your client than you got messing with City Hall. Your client may have enough money to hire a lawyer, but we already got lawyers, girl, and we got a whole arsenal besides, and it’s called ‘city government.’ Before you declare war, counselor, you better first remind yourself that we got lots of different weapons in that arsenal. Isn’t that so, Herman?”

  I was glad to get out of Nate’s office. Everything about him infuriated me—from his indifference to the plight of the women served by the Oasis Shelter to his smarmy male chauvinism to the way he wielded the instruments of power as if he’d actually earned them. Absent Orion Sampson, Nate would be a nobody—a fact that only underscored his own hypocrisy, and vulnerability. The congressman lived by the fundamentalist tenets of his church. According to one joke, he and his wife never had sex standing up because someone might think they were dancing. Swearing, drinking, and fornication were also on Sampson’s forbidden list. The consequences of violating that list were wondrous to behold. Seven years ago, Sampson’s eldest son, Orion junior, was a state representative, a vice president of a black-owned bank in his father’s district, and the heir apparent to his father’s congressional seat. Then he got sued by an exotic dancer who claimed that he’d fathered her child. When blood tests confirmed paternity, the congressman responded with Old Testament vengeance. These days, Orion junior sells used cars in north St. Louis.

  Fortunately for Nate, his uncle was rarely in town and never frequented Nate’s favorite nightspots. According to those in the know, Nate had taken one additional precautionary step—he’d procured a “fiancée” in the form of a churchgoing schoolteacher in her early thirties named Beatrice who accompanied Nate to all family gatherings. Uncle Orion was apparently quite taken with the demure Beatrice and never passed up the opportunity to urge his nephew to finally set the wedding date.

  Out in the hallway near the elevators, I conferred briefly with Sheila. She was heading back to the shelter, but I had another meeting in the building to try to straighten out a permit problem for a client.

  “Put me on the agenda for the next board meeting,” I told her. “I can tell them our options.”

  “Do we have any?” she asked bleakly.

  “Absolutely, Sheila. We have more leverage than you realize. Remember, Nate’s goal is to get this situation resolved quickly. He’s in there right now telling Borghoff to light a fire under the city’s lawyers. He’ll want them cranking out condemnation papers. The more we slow it down, the more the balance shifts in our favor.”

  “But how much can we really slow it down?”

  “You might be surprised.”

  ***

  My other meeting at City Hall lasted just thirty minutes. Afterward, I wandered slowly through the rotunda toward the exit, thinking over Angela’s situation. A large plaque on the wall caught my attention. According to the engraved text, it was placed there in memory of “the Distinguished Citizens of Greater St. Louis who perished in the Great Glider Crash at Lambert Field, August 1, 1943.” The list of dead included the mayor and nine other Distinguished Citizens.

  The Great Glider Crash of 1943?

  Here I was, a little over a half century later, with absolutely no idea what the plaque memorialized. I’d never heard of the Great Glider Crash of 1943 and didn’t recognize any of the names of the Distinguished Citizens—not even the mayor.

  There’s a lesson there, I told myself. Fifty years from now, the memories of Angela Green’s murder trial would be just as faint. After all, hadn’t other “trials of the century” faded long before the century had? Who today could even
recognize the names Bruno Hauptmann and Alfred de Marigny, much less recall the details of their respective murder trials, each of which mesmerized the nation while dominating the front pages for months? Were you to suggest to someone of Bruno Hauptmann’s era that there would come a time in America when the typical citizen could not recite the age, sex, or first name of the kidnapped Lindbergh baby or the place where the infant’s corpse was found, he would laugh in disbelief. Or that Sacco and Vanzetti, the most famous pair of criminal defendants of the first half of the twentieth century, could today be passed off as a perfumery from Florence: “Thrill to the scent of liberation—Anarchy, from Sacco & Vanzetti.” Who today even recalled their first names, much less their crime?

  And someday, I told myself, Angela’s celebrity would fade as well, along with the entourage of lawyers, judges, and witnesses who shared her spotlight. We’ll all meet up in the foyer of that celebrity netherworld with Bruno Hauptmann, the Lindbergh baby, O.J. Simpson, and the victims of the Great Glider Crash of 1943. As usual, Shakespeare said it first and said it best:

  Imperious Caesar, dead and turned to clay,

  Might stop a hole to keep the wind away.

  O, that that earth which kept the world in awe

  Should patch a wall to expel the winter’s flaw!

  Chapter Six

  I was back in my office after lunch trying to focus, trying to prepare for the two meetings tomorrow in Chicago—first with Angela’s criminal defense lawyer and then with the lawyers for all defendants in the Son of Sam lawsuit. But it was no use. I was distracted—still troubled by the Groucho Marx drug. Was it just another loose end, or an important one? How and why did something called “flunitrazepam” get into Angela Green’s bloodstream?