“No,” he said. “No one.” He didn’t want his mother’s help. Not now. And once he got into law school, he wouldn’t need it. He could probably get a job in the school library or something. In the meantime he could do this. He’d just gotten through five years at North Central—washing dishes for a few months was nothing. “It’s okay. I’ll take this for now.”
“And I promise, I’ll keep an eye out for you.”
“I’d appreciate it,” Jude said.
“It’s minimum wage, but you can get extra shifts if you want them. Here’s the information.” Mike handed a sheet of paper across the desk, and Jude reached out and took it.
“When can I start?”
“Tomorrow. They need people for the morning shift, and that starts at six.”
Jude wondered what kind of restaurant had a morning shift that started at six. He glanced down at the sheet and it answered his question. He was going to be working at the Sunshine Diner.
It didn’t matter. It might even be easier to work on his applications with this early shift. “That’s fine,” he said. “No problem.”
“You’re staying at the halfway house, right? I think that’s great. It helps to have people around who you can relate to.”
Other criminals, Jude interpreted.
The man must have realized how it sounded, because he said, “I mean other people who are going through the same thing. I always worry about the men who go right into a place of their own. The best, of course, is when you can stay with family, but if that’s not an option, the halfway house is a good place. Have you met Marvin yet? He’s another one of mine. Oh, and if you meet him, tell him I want to see him. He missed our last appointment.”
Jude thought that the last thing he would do if he met Marvin would be to tell him to go see his social worker.
“Give me a call and let me know how it’s going, and if you move, give me your new number so if anything comes up …”
“Yes, I will.”
“Great. Well, good luck.” Mike stood and offered his hand.
Jude shook Mike’s hand and found his own way out.
*
THE NEXT MORNING at six Jude entered through the back of the Sunshine Diner and made his way into the kitchen. He found it warm and bustling with people and immediately picked out the man in charge—a skill honed from years of obeying orders.
“Who are you?” the man demanded when Jude approached.
“I’m supposed to start work this morning, my name is—”
“Oh, you’re the new jailbird, huh? Hope you work out better than the last guy. He was here three days. A record, I think. So we’ll shoot for a week, okay? You work the sinks. How ’bout a pop quiz to see if you’re qualified? Do the taps turn clockwise or counterclockwise?” He waited. “No? I thought you were some sort of dishwashing expert. Can’t trust anybody to tell the truth these days. Everybody’s an expert, but I’ve got a soft heart, so I’ll let you give it a try. You wash. Pots, pans, some silverware, except for the knives. We got to take our precautions.” He smirked.
Jude knew the man was trying to provoke him, but after North Central he was immune to these types of insults. He had perfected his poker face when he was a kid, but it was only in prison that he had managed to match it with an inner calm, and it was mostly due to his studies. When he started, his only thought had been to become a lawyer to impress his mother, but he found the work helped him in ways he hadn’t imagined.
So Jude was back to washing dishes, but he didn’t let it bother him. It was only a temporary setback. He woke before the sun came up, rode the empty bus through the predawn streets to the diner, and washed dishes from six till three, when he emerged into the cold fall afternoon. Most of the kitchen staff in the back spoke Spanish, and they chattered on around him as if he didn’t exist. He tried a couple of short phrases— buenos días, cómo estás —but their eyes skidded over him, their lips curled, and they turned away.
The real day started after he finished work. He went straight from the diner to the library. The first week he spent researching the law schools in the area. He picked ten to apply to. At fifty bucks a pop it was all he could afford, but he thought that ten would cover it. He chose two that would be a stretch, and the rest he picked from schools he thought he should have a good shot at. His grades were way above their average, and he had scored in the top ninety-fifth percentile on the LSATs. Once he had decided on the schools, he spent an afternoon calling to request the applications. Some of them, he discovered, he could download from the Internet using the library’s computer. He was able to start on those immediately while he waited for the others to arrive in the mail.
Within three weeks Jude had sent off all ten applications, and then he had only to wait for their replies. He had rented a post office box for the purpose, and since most of the schools had rolling admissions, he wouldn’t have to wait until spring to find out where he would be attending in the fall. Maybe he would even be able to take some early classes in the summer.
The first response came back in less than a month. It was from one of two dream schools. His hands shook as he tore open the envelope. He read, “Thank you very much for your application, but we regret to inform you …” He didn’t need to read any more.
It had been a reach anyway, he told himself. He’d had to try, but it wasn’t exactly a surprise that he hadn’t gotten in. There were still nine schools to go.
He didn’t start to get nervous until he had heard back from six, all very politely turning him down. Then it was seven. Eight. Nine.
Still Jude didn’t give up hope. The tenth school—his last chance—was also his best. It was what he thought of as his safety—the one he would surely get into. An acceptance letter from this last school wouldn’t be as impressive, but what the hell. He would still be a lawyer, and that would surely be enough for Anna.
It was three agonizing weeks before he got the last letter. He tore it open, but all he had to see were the first two words, “We’re sorry …”
36
ONCE THAT DREAM had died, Jude decided to resurrect another; the next afternoon he arranged to meet Davis across the street from the offices of the Hartford Courant.
Jude spotted Davis the moment he walked out with a bag slung over his shoulder, his head bare to the wind. The pale blond hair was impossible to miss.
“Jude.” Davis clasped his hand. “My God, you’re out.”
“Can we talk somewhere?” Jude said.
“Sure. Absolutely. There’s a place around the corner.”
Jude followed him, and they were soon settled at a table in a restaurant so fancy Jude wouldn’t have dared to enter alone. He took one look at the menu and closed it. The meal would cost him almost as much as he earned in a day. The waiter came around to ask them if they wanted drinks. Davis ordered a beer and a steak. “The filets are great here,” he told Jude.
“I just ate,” Jude said, though it had been almost eight hours since he’d had lunch at the diner. “Nothing for me, thanks.”
The waiter looked at him over his pad and said, “Nothing?” in a tone that seemed to suggest he saw through Jude’s claim, though thankfully Davis seemed oblivious.
“A cup of tea, if you have it.”
“You drink tea?” Davis said after the waiter left.
“Why wouldn’t I?”
“I don’t know.” He seemed embarrassed. “No reason, I guess.”
Jude knew why Davis was surprised. He decided to have a little fun. He told Davis, with a perfectly straight face, “Everybody drinks it inside the pen. Especially the herbal ones.”
“You’re kidding. I would never have …” Then Davis stopped. “Oh, of course you are kidding. I’m such a sucker.”
“Sorry, I couldn’t resist.” Jude paused, then plunged in. “Listen, you have to promise me you will never print anything about me—not even that I’ve gotten out—unless I say you can, and I should warn you that I hope that I’ll never tell you to.” Jude was an
xious about Davis’s answer. How could he ask a journalist to help him—without even the promise of a story? But what choice did he have?
“You’re telling me you’re not going to let me publish anything?”
“Pretty much,” Jude said.
“That’s insane,” Davis said. “And it will probably drive me crazy not being able to write this up, but”—and he grinned—“you know what? I don’t care. I promise.”
“Really?”
Davis laid one hand on his heart and raised the other in the air. “Scout’s honor.”
So Jude told Davis everything. He thought it would be difficult, but the only difficult thing was how to get the words out fast enough. He started with his father’s murder and took Davis all the way through to the confrontation with Harry in the prison. However, he skipped over most of the last five years, mentioning only that he had gotten his GED and college degree and that he had been planning on going to law school.
Davis sat quietly listening to the story, but when Jude was done, he burst out, “I can’t believe what you gave up. Five years of your life—and what did you say you’re doing now? Washing dishes in the greasiest diner in town? If you hadn’t agreed to be set up, your mother would never have gotten elected as mayor. Maybe Harry was right and she would have lost her job as DA, too. So what? She’d be in private practice now, pulling in half a million or so a year in a cushy partnership. You would have finished at Benton, gone to college, and you could be doing anything right now. You could be in the law school of your choice.”
For a moment Jude imagined it—imagined that he had gone right from Benton to college to law school. Looking at it like that, he would already be in his first year. Then he remembered—he hadn’t even decided he wanted to go to law school until after Benito, and the way he’d been going at Benton, he might not have even graduated, much less gotten into college. Maybe, he thought, he had needed something as bad as Benito to get him to work as hard as he had. Maybe nothing else would have been enough. He had probably gotten further, at least with his education, than he would have if he hadn’t gone to prison.
The thought made it easier for him to say, “Well, it’s done and there’s nothing we can do about it.”
“You know what we can do? We can get your reputation back. Get your record cleared. We’ll get the proof, and I’ll write the story—”
“First of all, there isn’t any proof,” Jude interrupted. “Not anything concrete, at least. If there ever was any proof, you can be sure that in the last five years Harry has taken care of it. It doesn’t matter, though. You wouldn’t be printing the story even if we had the proof. You’ll never print the story. Remember?”
“I remember,” Davis assured him. “And I’ll keep my word, but for heaven’s sake, why?”
Because of Benito, Jude thought. Because of Old Man River. Aloud he said, “I don’t want revenge. I don’t want to ruin Harry and Anna, and if the story came out, I’m pretty sure it would. I just want a bit of my own back. I just want her to know the truth. That’s it.”
“So how do we do that? How do we convince her of the truth if there’s no proof?”
“The only way is if Harry tells her.”
“How do we get Harry to tell her?”
“That,” Jude said, “is the fun part.”
37
A WEEK LATER Jude stood by the curb under the light of the bright red-and-yellow Burger King sign, while the headlights of the cars caught him in their beams and swept past. Davis had offered to pick him up where he was staying, but Jude didn’t want Davis to see the halfway house—didn’t want him to walk into the dirty entryway with the iron grille over the reception desk and the cigarette butts that littered the floor—so Jude had named the Burger King as a more convenient meeting place.
Davis and Jude had met twice in the last week, both times downtown near the offices of the paper. They discussed what to do about Harry. Strategizing, Davis called it.
“Okay,” Jude had said. “To get Harry to do what we want, we need to find something to use as leverage.”
“You mean we blackmail him into telling her?”
“Now all we need to do is find something to blackmail him with.”
“What if there’s nothing to find?” Davis said.
“There’s what he did to me—though I doubt if we’ll find any trace of that. But there’ll be something else. I mean, think about the odds. We all have something—some little secret that could ruin us. Hell, I have one. You … well …”
“No, you’re right.” Davis grinned. “At heart we’re all scoundrels.”
Jude looked at him, and he thought that Davis looked about as far from a scoundrel as possible. People who passed him on the street often turned to take another look. Women smiled at him in hopes of catching his eye. Everyone seemed to want to please him, and Jude had seen him ask just one or two questions of a waiter or a coat girl and get practically their whole life story. It wasn’t until Jude had seen this happen twice that he realized he had done the same thing. He had told Davis everything, or almost everything. Davis would be a great reporter; it was only a matter of time, and Jude had told him so. “Oh, I know,” Davis had agreed, but when he said it, it didn’t sound conceited. It sounded honest. “But I don’t want to wait that long, arid just sitting back and waiting for it to come—well, that’s not what I think of as a reporter. I want to be the kind that goes after the story. The kind that makes things happen. I don’t want to coast. I want to … to blaze.” Then he had laughed at his melodrama, but it was a good word. He did blaze.
“You’re hardly a scoundrel,” Jude said. “Besides, I didn’t mean that. I just think everyone has something that they’re ashamed of. I just hope we can find what Harry’s ashamed of.”
“If it’s there, we’ll find it. We just need to figure out where to start looking.”
They had talked a long time and finally decided that Jude would use his connections and see where they might lead. That’s how they came to visit Mr. Levy.
A CAR PULLED into the Burger King, and instead of turning toward the drive-through, it pulled up behind Jude. When he looked over his shoulder, the headlights blinded him, but he then heard Davis’s voice call out, “You coming?”
Jude rounded the car and climbed in the passenger side.
“Are we set?”
Jude held up a piece of paper in answer. “I’ve got the directions, and we have an appointment for tonight.”
“How on earth did you arrange it?”
“The same way anyone gets in to see important people. I pulled some strings and a friend sent a letter of introduction.”
“Friend? How exactly did you meet this friend?”
The inmates that Jude had fought in that first year of his sentence later turned into good friends. It was one of these who had provided his connection to Levy.
“I beat him to a pulp,” Jude said.
“Half the time I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Davis complained.
“Don’t worry about it. Let’s just find the place, okay?”
The place was a restaurant—housed in a narrow brick building with Christmas lights strung up around the plate-glass windows. They parked the car, and Jude led the way inside. They were met by a short, fat man with a folio in the crook of his arm. The man glanced at Jude, then his eyes slid to Davis, standing half a step behind. He chose to ignore Jude and spoke instead to Davis. He said, “I’m sorry, sir, but do you have a reservation? We’re quite full this evening.”
Davis hesitated and started to say, “No, but—”
Jude interrupted. “Is there anything under the name of Duck?”
The short man reacted suitably. He stood up straighter and took another look at Jude. “Right this way, sir,” the man said, ignoring Davis now and dipping his head to Jude. As he led them through the restaurant, they passed through the outer room, then a smaller back room, and finally through a swinging door into the kitchen. The kitchen was like a sauna,
heat rising from the huge stove that ran the length of one wall. The temperature was increased by the swarm of bodies that tended the pots and ovens, bent over the sinks, and stood along the long chrome table where they carefully arranged the plates of food. The man snaked his way through the chaos, and Jude and Davis followed as best they could. When they caught up to the maître d’, he was standing by a narrow table covered with a white tablecloth and pushed against the back wall. There were three chairs pulled up, and one of them was occupied by Mr. Levy.
He looked like what he usually pretended to be: a very wealthy elderly businessman. He was carefully dressed in a charcoal suit with a white shirt and a red tie. He had a white linen napkin laid across his lap, and on the table in front of him were the remains of a meal. It was an incongruous picture—set as it was in the midst of the chaos of the crowded, sweaty kitchen. Jude suspected that Mr. Levy had chosen this place deliberately but wasn’t sure of the reason. If he had chosen it specifically to talk with Jude, then it was to emphasize how far he was stooping to meet with him. If he used this as his regular meeting place, then it would mean something else altogether, but Jude didn’t get a chance to ask him.
The man who led them there pulled a chair out for Jude. Davis claimed the other one.
“So … you’re Duck?” Levy said, inspecting Jude. He had the accents of privilege, though Jude had heard rumors that he’d come from nothing and any privileges he had were ones he had won for himself.
“Yes,” Jude replied.
Davis must have shot Jude a bewildered look, and Mr. Levy’s sharp eyes caught it.
“And who’s this?”
Jude answered before Davis could speak. “This is Davis Marshall. He’s a reporter for the Hartford Courant, but he won’t write anything about you, sir.”
“Of course he won’t,” the old man said. “Not if he wants to keep his job. What has he to do with you?”
“He’s helping me,” Jude said. “He’s a friend.”
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