A House on Liberty Street

by Neil Turner

  “But we already know most of them are out of the game this time.”

  “So, you need a Plan B.”

  “I’ve got a few days off after Christmas to canvass the neighborhood. I’ll look for a few gamers.”

  “There’s gotta be a story somewhere in here,” she says after flipping through the real estate papers again. “Can I get copies?”

  When I return from making copies in my kitchen “office,” Pat is wearing a half-smile while she watches the fish.

  “Pretty cool,” she says. “I’ve never been able to keep fish alive. Do you have any idea how many goldfish might have been saved if I had this channel?”

  I shake my head and laugh, but a deep stab of guilt follows when I think about the day. “I would have come if it had just been you and me for dinner.”

  “You got something against my family, buster?”

  “I can’t deal with anyone’s family today, Pat. It’s all too fresh.”

  Her eyes drop to the package I still haven’t opened. “Open your present.”

  I heft it and turn it over a couple of times, then give the package a shake and sniff around the edges. “Maybe a book?”

  She rolls her eyes. “Why don’t you open it and see?”

  Sure enough, it’s a book. The Razor’s Edge by W. Somerset Maugham. “Maugham? Isn’t he one of those guys English professors torment their students with?”

  She laughs. “It’s called literature, bozo. I’m not going to say I always lapped this stuff up in school, but I was lucky enough to find my way back to it when I actually knew enough about life and the world to appreciate books like this.”

  I remember writing an essay on Maugham’s tale of a First World War veteran who turned his back on Chicago society to search for the deeper meaning of life. I still remember the gist of it. A maverick in the most un-American sense of the word, Laurence Darrell was that rare creature able to shrug off the straitjacket of societal expectations and conventions. Larry, who pointedly eschewed the desperately excessive lifestyle of his wealthy peers, was a character I had dismissed as something of a flake, or possibly an intellectual dilettante. If I remember this much, it must have made more of an impression than I realized at the time. Something in this story obviously matters to Pat. I resolve to discover what it is. “Thank you.”

  “How was Christmas in Brussels?” she asks.

  “Who knows? I left Britts a message and haven’t heard back.”

  “The little fart still hasn’t sent me an email,” Pat complains. “Maybe she’s having too much fun in Europe to bother with us Yankees?”

  We pass a few minutes discussing the Christmas gift haul of Pat’s nieces and nephews, plus some O’Toole family news. “It’s been another lovely O’Toole family Christmas, Tony. Every year when we’re all sitting around the table for Christmas dinner, I realize how lucky I was to be born into my family.”

  I’m in the kitchen digging out hot chocolate fixings when the phone rings. “We’re about to find out how Christmas went in Europe,” I say when the caller ID announces that it’s Brittany.

  Pat edges toward the door.

  I wave her back in. Brittany will be pleased to have a chance to talk to her. “Stay. We can both yell at her.”

  I’m surprised to find Michelle on the line. “Merry Christmas, Tony.”

  “Merry Christmas.”

  “Let me put you on speaker so we can all talk,” she says.

  “Merry Christmas, Dad!” Brittany exclaims.

  “Merry Christmas, honey,” I reply with a grin. I put our phone on speaker and announce, “Pat’s here. Say hi.”

  “Hi!” Pat and Brittany shout in unison.

  “Did you guys spend Christmas together?” Brittany asks.

  “We’ve been visiting for a few minutes while Pat drops off my present,” I reply while spooning heaping piles of cocoa into a pair of mugs.

  “What did you give him?” Brittany asks Pat.

  “A book.”

  “I thought you liked him?”

  I chuckle while Pat rolls her eyes.

  “Which book?” Michelle asks.

  “The Razor’s Edge,” I reply.

  “Maugham?” she says with disdain.

  Pat stiffens but holds her tongue.

  “Who’s Maugham?” Brittany asks.

  “We had to read him in school,” Michelle replies, taking pains to make it sound like an onerous ordeal. It’s certainly not a book her father, the inestimable Prescott Rice III, and his fellow Wall Street tycoons and cronies would approve of, and Michelle is very much her father’s daughter.

  Brittany laughs brightly, oblivious to her mother’s oblique bitchiness. “Why didn’t you just give him a lump of coal?”

  “What did you do today?” I ask before Pat can respond to Michelle’s barb.

  “We’re skiing in St. Moritz with Morgan,” Brittany says. “We’re going back to Brussels tomorrow night.”

  Brittany didn’t mention travel plans. “Morgan?” I ask lightly. “Girlfriend or some Belgian beefcake you picked up?”

  “Morgan Tomlinson,” Michelle clarifies.

  What’s he doing there? I wonder. Tomlinson is a blue-blood marketing executive with Coca-Cola. He’d still been working in Atlanta when we left. None of my business, I guess. Still, I wonder when that started. “No cell service in St. Moritz?” I ask with a touch of sarcasm.

  “Well, it’s late here and I just wanted to make sure Brittany had a chance to call before bed,” Michelle announces. “Maybe you can call back at a more opportune time for the two of you to chat.”

  “C’mon Mom!” Brittany argues. “I’m wide awake!”

  “Good night, Tony,” Michelle says while Brittany continues to protest in the background. The line goes dead before I can reply.

  “Wow,” Pat says. “Nice wife you had there, Valenti.”

  “I’m sorry,” I grumble through clenched teeth.

  “No need to apologize for her.”

  The kettle boiled while we were on the phone. I pour the water and toss a handful of frozen mini marshmallows into each cup before sliding one across to Pat.

  “I’m making progress at Village Hall,” she announces while she stirs the marshmallows.

  “Progress on what?”

  “I’ve been asking around about what happened to your father’s building permit application.”

  That’s news to me. “And?”

  She smiles. “I think I’ve got the license guy dead to rights.”

  “He deliberately held things up?”

  “Yup. Not that I think he did it on his own initiative.”

  The initiative would no doubt be Zaluski’s, the rotten bastard. “So now what?”

  “I’ll set up a meeting with him after New Year’s.”

  “Will he give up Zaluski?”

  “Be patient, Tony. Even if this guy implicates Zaluski, showing that the village dragged its feet with the building permit is a baby step. Taking Zaluski and the mayor down won’t be easy… or quick. It’s going to take time to get to the bottom of whatever’s going on.”

  My doubts must be obvious. She touches my arm and says, “I’ve got faith in you, Tony. You’ll rally the troops and come out of this on top.”

  I do well not to laugh in the face of her misplaced faith. As for rallying the troops, it’s no secret that people don’t much like me; didn’t someone just try to turn me into the Christmas roast turkey?

  I break out the Maker’s Mark as soon as Pat leaves and am spiraling down into a black hole of despair by the time I finish draining the first bottle. My eyes land on the dog in his bed, chin resting on his paws as he gazes back at me. Good old Deano. Loyal Deano. Dogs don’t just up and discard you. I stagger over to Deano’s bed and lay on the floor, getting nose-to-nose to him with my chin resting on the backs of my hands. His sad eyes stare back into mine.

  I know he wants Mama or Papa, preferably both. “I’m here for you, pal, but I’m not who you really want, am
I? You mind if we feel incomplete together?”

  Deano’s chocolate eyes gaze back without comment. We stare deep into one another’s soul for a minute or two.

  “You comfort me a lot more than I comfort you,” I mumble before pushing myself back up.

  After splashing more bourbon into a glass, I take the bottle for a visit to the Valenti family picture wall. My eyes settle on Frankie’s high school graduation picture. Definitely the better looking of the Valenti boys, he was two inches shorter than me at the time but twenty pounds heavier. The extra weight was all muscle that he put to use as a brawler and destroyer of little brothers. My earliest memory of Frankie’s animosity was being abandoned in a sandbox several blocks from home when I was four or so. Frankie had taken me well beyond Independence Park while babysitting me. I didn’t understand the words he taunted me with when he left me behind in tears, but I did learn to recognize the cruel smile and mean little eyes that were seared into my psyche through the long reign of Fearsome Frankie. I’ve since learned that Frankie told Mama and Papa that I had run away from Independence Park that day when he had “looked away for a second.” That was only the beginning. I didn’t recognize the bullying for what it was until we got a little older. When I dared to push back, things turned ugly… and stayed that way. It had been followed by years of beatings, destroyed homework, broken toys, and public humiliation—particularly at school. Things had slowed some when Frankie finished high school and moved out, but never stopped completely. It had culminated a few years later when Frankie arrived on Liberty Street after overindulging in happy hour at the end of a day’s work on a road crew. He found me home alone on semester break from my freshman year of college. I made the mistake of challenging his taunting rant about me being a school pussy by telling him that I wasn’t stupid enough to skip university for beer money. I’d then pointed out that I’d be making something out my life while he dug ditches.

  “I couldn’t afford university,” he’d erupted. “But you get to go, you pampered, spoiled little prick!” The first sucker punch had landed while I argued that I couldn’t afford to go, either, but had busted my ass to earn my volleyball scholarship. A flurry of punches quickly put me down. Then he’d grabbed my arm, dislocating my elbow and shoulder while he dragged me into the basement with my head bouncing off the steps until it finally thudded onto the concrete basement floor. He pounded me into a bloody pulp, leaving me with a shattered orbital bone, my nose mashed across my cheek, two broken ribs, and a punctured lung. I’d only been saved by Mama and Amy arriving home from grocery shopping. Frankie, disheveled, out of breath, splattered with blood, and sporting swollen knuckles, had fled after telling them I’d fallen down the stairs. Amy found me in a crumpled heap behind the furnace and screamed for Mama to call 9-1-1. The hospital had stitched up the cuts, reset the broken bones, and removed my spleen. Poor Amy had later apologized for never intervening over the years; she was too afraid of our older brother to risk his ire. Neither of us saw him again. Although he’d gone on to join the Marines so that he and Amy were both service members at the time of her death, he didn’t bother to attend her funeral.

  “Why do you hate me?” I ask as I stare at his familiar smirk. “Answer me, goddammit!”

  No reply, of course, just that smirk. I’ve wondered all my life what it is about me that makes people turn away. My own brother, for God’s sake. Even Papa slapped me around now and again after a little too much grappa. My wife ditched me. Twice. Hell, even my own daughter can’t stand to be around me. I reach out and touch Frankie’s picture. “Maybe you were right all along. Michelle, too. I really am a worthless sack of shit. A waste of space. A malignancy in the genetic pool.”

  They’d called me all of these things and more. I knock back another slug of bourbon and stare at my sorry-assed reflection in the wall mirror beside the picture collection. I’m the human equivalent of a used condom—worthless, unwanted, and easily discarded.

  Chapter Eighteen

  “Well, if it isn’t my secret weapon,” Mike says with a grin when I walk into the vestibule at the Cook County Jail on the evening of January third.

  “What are you talking about?” I ask.

  “Didn’t you read the Trib this morning?”

  I did. Gearing up for the trial, the state’s attorney’s reporter (as Pat calls him) wrote a little piece about how Tony Valenti, “fresh from his role as the principal attorney of disgraced Sphinx Financial,” was now on the defense team of his father, “cop-killer Francesco Valenti,” “lending his considerable legal clout pro bono to buttress the defense team assembled by the Public Defender’s office.” The asshole even slipped in a little blurb about me stirring up trouble in Cedar Heights, all the better to polish my bad-guy credentials. Subtext to potential jurors: Don’t trust this man!

  “My boss saw that,” I groan. Lawrence Goddard ordered me to keep a low profile in my father’s trial and around Cedar Heights. Fleiss Lansky LLP apparently has zero tolerance for troublemakers in the community.

  “Isn’t that Alex Dempsey a piece of work?” Mike says as we approach the security checkpoint. “The dastardly Tony Valenti slinking back to Cedar Heights to undermine The American Way and all that is good and wholesome in the world.”

  “Like I’m some sort of legendary defense attorney.” Dempsey would have a good laugh if he understood the inadequacy that lies at the heart of me. It will be apparent soon enough.

  “You must be,” Mike says. “Poor Alex makes it sound like they’re totally outgunned by the two of us.”

  “Right. We’ve got them outnumbered two to thirty or thereabouts, plus all the cops they have at their disposal.”

  Mike cracks his knuckles and meets my gaze. “How’s the job?”

  “Most days I feel the need for a shower on the way out.” He cocks an eyebrow, so I continue. “A Wisconsin court subpoenaed the engineering and testing documents about a Fafnir furnace component that allegedly failed and caused a natural gas explosion that annihilated a La Crosse home and its three inhabitants. Fafnir has ordered me to quash the court order by any means necessary. They’re determined to keep the truth buried.”

  “That’s soul-killing shit, brother. Makes me feel good about what I do—shitty hours, shitty money, and all.”

  “How did court go?” I ask. Mike had requested a continuance this afternoon, arguing that the prosecution’s tardiness in delivering their psychiatric evaluation has delayed us ordering our own.

  “No continuance. Judge Mitton wasn’t sympathetic. He says we should have gotten our own evaluation done by now, regardless of what the prosecution was doing.”

  “Bastard!”

  Mike raises an amused eyebrow. “You’re anti-Mitton?”

  “Hell yes!”

  “I’m okay with old Myron,” Mike says before putting a finger to his lips when we reach security. He expands on his point once we’re through and climbing the stairs to the interview rooms. “His time on the bench is winding down, making him less susceptible to pressure. Sure, he’s a little crusty, but that cuts both ways. He’s never been one to coddle prosecutors.”

  “He hasn’t seemed too fair so far.”

  “Francesco killed a cop, Tony. No judge likes that. We could have done much worse than Mitton. How’d you like some character two years removed from the state’s attorney’s office—another law-and-order butcher with political aspirations?”

  “Things didn’t go too well with Mitton today, did they?” I argue stubbornly.

  “He was right, Tony. A continuance wasn’t warranted. I should have gotten our shrink in to see Francesco sooner. Don’t blame the judge. Blame me. I screwed up.” Mike gives me a long look and says, “The judge sets the rules in the courtroom, decides what evidence comes in and what doesn’t. No matter how much pressure the State brings to bear, Mitton will play this straight. He knows we haven’t caught a break yet. When he thinks we’ve earned it, he’ll toss us a bone or two.”

  Mike pulls a thin sheaf of
papers out of his briefcase after we enter the conference room. “Here’s the psychiatric assessment from the prosecution,” he says with a sneer before reading from the summary. “‘Subject presents tendencies suggestive of antisocial personality disorder.’ They’re not saying he’s a little withdrawn when they use that term, Tony. This says Francesco is an aberrant personality inherently prone to violent behavior.”

  “That’s so much bullshit,” I scoff.

  “Yeah, well, you know it and I know it. In fact, lots of folks may know it, but the judge and jury don’t know it.” His eyes drop back to the report. “‘Shooting Deputy O’Reilly was a manifestation of a possible impulse control disorder known as intermittent explosive disorder.’” Mike stops and meets my eyes. “In other words, he can blow again at any time.”

  “Jesus.”

  He sighs heavily. “The judge is right. We should have done our own assessment.”

  “Why didn’t we?”

  His shoulders sag. “Same old story… not enough time, not enough money. I have someone coming to talk to Francesco tomorrow. We have to discredit this horseshit,” he says while tossing the report on the table. “Francesco needs to be seen as a highly distressed man who lost control for an instant.”

  After getting to his feet to pace and blow off a little steam about other bullshit stunts he’s encountered at the hands of prosecutors, Mike slides back into his seat and gives me a tired smile. “I read the story about your sister in the Trib. Anyone who reads that story oughtta be feeling a little sorry for Francesco.”

  “Let’s hope so. Pat has another story about a jerk in the Cedar Heights licensing office taking a bribe to hold up Papa’s building permit to fix the garage.”

  “A bribe in Cedar Heights, you say?” he mutters sarcastically.

  The door finally opens and a guard lets Papa into the conference room. After we exchange greetings, Mike gives Papa a quick recap of the prosecution’s psychiatric assessment.

  “I not some crazy nut like they say,” Papa retorts. “Why they say this?”