Carom Shot

by JJ Partridge

  “As far as I know, no confession. What he would tell you ...?” I covered my obvious hesitation with a sip of coffee. “It’s all sort of hearsay, anyway.”

  “Hearsay?” Tramonti clapped his right hand to his forehead, a sound loud enough to prick up Oboe’s ears. “Did you say ‘hearsay?’ Give me a break! You were a prosecutor, right? A long time ago but nothing’s changed. You know we can hold him on hearsay! Even hearsay two steps removed! Or as a material witness!”

  Tramonti’s black eyes searched my face, expecting a lot more than I felt that I could give. “All I know is that his mother and Reverend Thomas talked him into coming in. Doesn’t seem likely it was either a confession or an accusation.” What I had somehow rationalized was that whatever Williams told Reverend Thomas, a clergyman, was privileged under Rhode Island law, and what Reverend Thomas told me would be privileged if he claimed I acted as his lawyer.

  Or, something like that.

  “Look, Algy, I was, for you, going to give him a chance to tell his story, and now it turns out he’s a walking drug store, he’s got Jerry Franks as his lawyer, and he’ll be out of here in an hour. I’ll look very stupid, Algy, very stupid. Nothing better for Sonny and the Chief.”

  I got the message. Tramonti and I go back to seventh form at Moses Brown Academy and were roommates at Harvard Law; I was his best man and godfather to his eldest daughter. That would be McCarthy’s spin: the Commissioner was backing his old East Side buddy instead of one of the “blues.”

  Tramonti shook his head in frustration and went around the desk where he rolled his shirtsleeves even further up his muscular arms. “I should have known better than mix you up in this. A mistake. Because this will be nasty and very public before it’s over and you are now up to your neck in this as far as the Chief is concerned. So is the University. Sonny and McCarthy can’t separate things.”

  Better to leave it there, I thought. “I need a ride home.”

  His hand slapped the desk top. “I’ve got just the thing. A cruiser with siren, maybe lights flashing? Let everyone on The Hill know Mr. Temple was out fighting crime!” This came out as very sarcastic but ended with a trace of smile. “Better yet, I should just call Nadie to come and pick you up. She’d know how to get through to you.”

  Ugh.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  By the time the cruiser dropped me off, without blue and white strobe flashes or siren, it was after nine. Except for asking my address, the surly-faced cop at the wheel didn’t say a word except “yuh” when I thanked him for the ride home. Already, I had the mark of a pariah.

  I live in an 1830 Greek Revival nestled into the steep rise of The Hill on Congdon Street, a five minute walk up to the campus and a five minute walk to the downtown. The shambles I had purchased for its magnificent view of the city required two years of restoration, including a slate roof replacement, deleading of clapboards, granite buttresses to support the embankment down to Pratt Street, a new kitchen with a den facing the city’s skyline, and a functional loft-like space out of most of the second floor. As I put my raincoat in the hall closet and hung my suit jacket over the banister, today’s efforts by Mrs. Pina, my twice-a-week cleaning lady, were evident in the gleam of the hall table and the pervasive scent of Garden Fresh Glade. In the kitchen, a room of open chrome shelving, limestone flooring, and granite countertops, all traces of my bachelor weekend—dirty dishes in the sinks, pots on the Viking range, empty Sam Adams bottles, and the odor of pepperoni pizza—had been whisked away in her whirlwind of dust cloths and generous use of Windex. A large hand-painted ceramic bowl from Portugal, adorned with flowers, birds, leaping hares, and hounds and filled with gorgeous looking apples, was in the middle of the counter.

  I opened the Sub-Zero for a beer, went into the adjoining den, and looked out into the night. In its blackness, the office and apartment towers of downtown were defined by layers of lights separated by Providence’s boulevards, streets, and sweeping curves of its rivers; the domes of the State House were bathed in uplighting that magnified their size and presence. Yet again, the view confirmed that despite the cost, the haggles with the Preservation Commission for permission to create the den and the loft, and the irksome lack of city services on The Hill, it was worth the investment.

  After a large swig of beer, I unclipped my Blackberry from my belt and called the parsonage. Reverend Thomas didn’t interrupt as I told him that the arresting cops had acted against Tramonti’s orders and that Lavelle Williams had a lawyer and would be released within the hour. After a long pause, in a voice that began in disappointment and became one of humiliation, he described the cops hammering at the door, the mother’s wails, Lavelle Williams’s attempt to escape out of a window and cries of betrayal, and his own pleas to the cops that Williams was on his way to the Commissioner’s office. I assured him that his intervention might have saved Williams from harm, in words that came out as an apology. His response was a short and unequivocal statement of failure in his personal, redemptive mission. “Nothin’ to do now,” he said and ended the call with a “thank you” spoken so weakly that my embarrassment for him—and me—was acute. The thought of repeating the story to my mother and Sylvia was so unpleasant, I decided to put that off until tomorrow.

  “Ugh!”

  I needed a friend! Where was Nadie? Earlier, I had left messages for her at her apartment and at the Psychology Department, hoping that a few days away would reduce some of her recent prickliness toward the University—and me—for the “impotent” security efforts and their “underlying causes.” Nadie the Psychologist is big on “underlying causes.”

  I reached her at the Women’s Center. She said matter-of-factly, “I’m hungry. Why don’t you pick me up and we’ll get some Chinese.” I promptly agreed. “I’ve only been back since four and all I’ve heard about is this murder. We’ve got two overcrowded groups going on here right now. Apparently, Danby went to some of the dorms tonight. The rumors ...!”

  “Ten minutes,” I said.

  * * *

  Nadie was waiting in the vestibule of the Women’s Center, a converted two-story residence across from the women’s dorms on Peckham Street. We kissed and I felt her willowy body under her light raincoat. It was an inappropriately long kiss that was perhaps unexpected by both of us. She took a step back, looked at me as though startled, then faced a hall mirror where she swept her black hair over her shoulders. She smiled and my eyes lingered over the face in the mirror: prominent cheekbones and narrow chin, pale skin with a scattering of freckles over her nose, black eyebrows and eyelashes, a thin-lipped mouth with a natural pink that gave them measure, and green eyes that can be opaque as sea glass one second and exotic as emeralds the next. Catching my expression, she broke into a waif-like smile that can break my heart.

  Ah, Nadie.

  With a black bag slung over her shoulder, we went out into the chilly, foggy night where our breaths immediately clouded and were blown away by a sharp wind. As we approached Thayer Street, I was into an account of the last few hours, ending my excitedly-told tale with what I knew of Jerome Franks. “You should have seen McCarthy and Tramonti when they heard Franks was involved!”

  Nadie didn’t immediately respond. I’m in love with a woman who espouses the Shakespearean view that it would be a public good to get rid of all the lawyers. For her, most are over-paid, morally inert, agents of the propertied class; the only lawyers worth their salt worked for social agencies, the ACLU, or as public defenders. Criminal lawyers who defended Mafiosi or crooked politicians or corrupt corporate executives were worse than their clients, hence, her apparent quandary: an abhorrently notorious mouthpiece was defending a young black man from the mercies of the Providence police! After a moment of consideration, she said in that whithering yet nonchalant Lauren Bacall-ish voice she has when edgy, “Whatever.”

  I knew better than to push.

  Thayer Street, the campus’s main drag, is alive, trashy, nondescript, and very non-Ivy, having had the benefit of
haphazard growth which permitted the funky, the offbeat, and the countercultural to prosper, survive, or disappear without notice. The University, always ambivalent towards neighborhood complaints of any sort, usually maintains a deaf ear to the frequent merchant promoted, ambitious redesign projects, realizing that backing any plan would offend any number of campus groups. Anyway, our students like Thayer Street the way it is.

  Tonight, the glistening sidewalks reflected the resplendent garishness of its jumble of bookstores, head shops, clothing stores, music stores, pizza and sub joints, clubs, Dunkin’ Donuts and Starbucks, tea bars, restaurants, video stores, tattoo and body piercing parlors, hairdressers, and convenience stores. Multi-colored flyers, along with a zillion stapled bits of their predecessors, festooned utility poles and message kiosks; stands for alternative newspapers and entertainment and real estate guides competed with Keep Providence Beautiful trash bins for space at street corners. The beaded finishes of parked cars—too many of them sleek BMWs and Audis and bulky SUVs to belie all of Sonny’s prejudices towards our students—and rows of motorcycles at the curb reflected the storefronts’ neon. Knots of students of both sexes flowed toward us from the Sisson Street dorms; a single white and blue police cruiser, its wipers swishing slowly back and forth, had a lone occupant who looked routinized to the streetscape. His token presence constituted tonight’s city-provided protection from The Stalker.

  We avoided an aggressive panhandler with a “veteran” sign looped around his neck as I remarked that not even the threat of The Stalker seemed to affect Thayer Street.

  Nadie tugged me forward at a faster pace. “You think if something affects you in a certain way, it’s like that for everybody. I don’t know if it’s sentimentality or the way you were brought up.” She paused. “Either way,” she said lightly, “it might be saner.”

  I didn’t reply. When she begins a psychological excursion, I know better.

  A group of teenage girls, perhaps thirteen or fourteen years of age, exploded from a pizzeria and walked noisily toward us, laughing, wide-eyed, two on their cell phones, all smoking cigarettes awkwardly—one in particular had enough makeup to qualify for a Rocky Horror Picture Show contest. I wondered aloud “Why aren’t they home doing something? Where the hell are their parents! The Stalker could be one of those guys right over there,” and gestured with my free arm towards some dark figures standing under the canopy of the Thayer Mini-Mart, “or anywhere.”

  Nadie drew me a bit closer. We were a block away from the China Dragon, our destination. Her head was bent slightly forward, her voice was so low that I had difficulty hearing her.

  “When I was at Harvard,” she began, “there was a rape, right off the Square, a block or so from our Radcliffe dorm. The victim was a grad student. A single, isolated rape. Not like this epidemic but it was really played up in the Crimson and in the Globe and on television.” We waited at the corner of Olive Street while a rusty VW van held together by Grateful Dead bumper stickers and duct tape noisily turned into the street. “It’s all we talked about,” she continued. “Precautions, how terrible it would be to be assaulted, what would we do to defend ourselves. We got mace. We got instructions. We had meetings. Solidarity! Sisterhood!” We crossed the street in a miasma of the van’s exhaust fumes. “It was ... surreal, the sessions in which we discussed it, tried to deal with it. Then they caught him and it turned out to be a mentally challenged guy thrown out on the street when the state closed its mental institutions. He must have been a sex-starved time bomb and the state was responsible for—”

  A passing motorcycle’s rumble interrupted. She looked up at me sharply and was about to continue when she pointed towards the marquee at the Avon Cinema, the art film house down the block. It was a Monday night Kevin Spacey double feature, Usual Suspects and L. A. Confidential. “We could use a hard-boiled cop around here right now. Instead, we get the Providence version of Inspector Clouseau!”

  * * *

  The China Dragon, sandwiched between a comic book emporium and a crystal-happy holistic artifact store, was steamy with soy sauce, hot peanut oil, and spices. Huge handwritten signs on the walls lied “No MSG.” Somehow, despite its meager décor of time-warped prints, yellowed fans, red lantern lights with dusty red tassels, worn linoleum, and scarred booths, it had survived competition from newer and glitzier Thai, Vietnamese, and other Asian restaurants by serving enormous helpings of inexpensive, really good food. The always disinterested manager flashed a gold incisor as we entered and led the way to a booth adorned with a bottle of dark sauce, a sprig of plastic flower in a tiny plastic vase, a container of napkins, and stained plastic-coated menus leaning against an imitation knotty pine wall. He continued through a bamboo curtain into the kitchen where pots clanged and crashes erupted as he got someone’s attention in loud Cantonese over the strains of something twangy from the Hong Kong hit parade. We hung our coats on a pole next to the booth, slid in, flattened the menus on the Formica-topped table, and ordered a “number sixteen” for two from a diminutive waitress who neither greeted us nor thanked us for our order. She disappeared into the kitchen and returned to deliver a chipped ceramic teapot and two companion cups. Nadie poured and we clinked cups, sort of a salute to being together.

  Nadie propped her head on her open palms and smiled. She was wearing a dark green blouse with a silver moon-shaped pin. Her skin glowed although her eyes were tired, with tiny crow’s-feet in their corners. As a lead into telling her how much I missed her, I described my Thanksgiving and asked about hers. She recounted a weekend of mother-daughter bickering—not married, no grandchildren, you never call—and went on about the only child problem of a mother a thousand miles away, getting older, crankier, and lonely. Listening to her, I realized it was unlikely that she had lightened her perspective on the University’s response to The Stalker: Nadie was of the fiercely held belief that College Hall had flubbed-the-dub on its handling of the crisis which, among other effects, resulted in extra hours for her as a volunteer psychologist at the Women’s Center.

  When she finished, I mentioned Reinman’s death over the weekend and Marcie’s unforgiving comments. Nadie’s face screwed into a frown and she began to fidget with a paper napkin, wrapping it around and around her fingers. I assumed her reaction was because of his conservative politics and said so.

  “Which doesn’t put me in a distinct minority since he was—” She was interrupted as our meal, chicken with almonds, scallions, pea pods, and mushrooms, with a mound of white rice, arrived in a clatter of thick serving dishes pushed around the table by the waitress. As I started to serve the food, she said, “He made a pass at me when I first came here, and—”

  The serving fork and spoon were caught in mid-air. “You’ve never mentioned it.” She let me fill her plate, took two quick bites of the spicy chicken, and put down her fork. I filled my plate. “Beat me to it,” I said and smiled, even though the eyes which met mine, didn’t.

  “No, you don’t get it,” she said soberly, patting her mouth with a napkin. “He was aggressive. He was playful but very aggressive. It was as though he could sense some vulnerability. To tell you the truth, after our first encounter, I was ... wary of him.”

  It is hard for me to imagine that Nadie would be that put off by Reinman, or anyone else, for that matter. She is basically fearless, assumes yoga positions you don’t see on Fit TV, and earned a belt of some color in karate. However, the expression on her face convinced me that she was serious. I stopped eating and said, “Should I ask ...?”

  Her fork prodded her food. “It was right after I took the job here. I met him at the College Bookstore. He knew who I was; that flattered me. Then he got me into …, what was the name of that coffee house next to the Avon? Peaberry’s? In a few minutes, he was coming on to me. I couldn’t believe it; it was all so smooth, so practiced. When I said ‘no,’ he laughed as though it had all been a joke, that I had misunderstood his obvious interest. It was eerie, the way he did it. A couple of months later, at
a party, he did it again, almost as though the first time was a dry run, to get the idea into me that he would do it again, and that it would be worthwhile to have it happen.” She shrugged her shoulders. “It didn’t, and he never suggested it again, even though we would bump into each other from time to time. Anyways, his politics are ..., were ..., odious!”

  With that, she began to devour the meal. I remained silent because I couldn’t see them together in any circumstances, not Nadie the Radical and Reinman of the Right! Anyway, I wasn’t sure how to react.

  Eventually, she put down her fork. “You and Reinman,” she said with eyes at once more serious and sentimental than I would have expected, “you are completely different.” She twisted away a strand of hair from her forehead. “He was handsome, confident …, charming comes to mind, and such a celebrity.” Her voice dropped to a more intimate level. “And he was a practitioner of the art of seduction, I’ll tell you that, and he had to use it. You could feel it in him ....”

  I stopped eating, waiting for the rest of this complicated distinction that I wasn’t sure was going to be flattering.

  “You …,”—she searched for the right word—“… you’re just ... you. You have a kind of integrity and character and depth that Reinman never had, couldn’t aspire to, probably didn’t even know existed.” She dropped her earnestness, probably because I was blushing or close to it, and then she smiled that smile. “And, I bet a much better, more constant lover.”