by D. W. Buffa
Caminetti was on his feet, straightening his suit jacket, ready to turn toward the door.
“I’m not placing a gag order on anyone, yet; but the first time I hear anyone mention the vice president’s name in connection with the issues in this case,” he said with a stare that behind the surface of affable good manners was deadly serious, “the first time anyone connected with either the prosecution or the defense so much as speculates as to why or whether the vice president might be called as a witness; the first time this threatens to become anything more than a trial of an indicted defendant on a charge of murder, I won’t hesitate for a moment to do so and to impose the most severe sanctions, including proceedings for disbarment, against any attorney who fails to comply.”
Judge Scarborough placed his hand on my shoulder and walked me past Caminetti. “I hope you enjoy New York while you’re here with us. If there is anything I can do… ?” He opened the door for me. I suppose I should have held it for Caminetti, but I let it shut behind me instead.
I was halfway down that narrow, bleak, crowded corridor, almost to the jury room, when I heard him coming up behind me.
“Antonelli,” he called in that short, sharp New York voice. I stopped, twisted my head over my shoulder, waiting for him to catch up. He kept walking, did not even slow down, just kept moving, hurrying along to whatever he had to do next. Without wanting to, without really knowing why I was doing it except out of a kind of astonished curiosity to find out what he wanted and in the process perhaps learn something more about him, I followed, quickening my pace.
“Where are you staying?” he asked. I did not have the chance to answer or even decide if I wanted to. “You like Italian?” He did not wait for an answer this time either. “’Course you do. Try Carmine’s—Upper West Side. Don’t take reservations. Always crowded. Use my name. You’ll get a table. Really,” he added with a slight, but decisive, nod as he glanced at me for the first time.
We were three steps from the door that led into the courtroom. I looked him in the eye and tossed my head, gesturing back toward the room we had just left. In a conversation with Bartholomew Caminetti words were a kind of fatal redundancy.
“That?” he remarked with a shrug. “Lot of money. Wife had money, too. Divorced couple years ago.” He started to turn, realized that someone from out of town might require a more detailed explanation, and added, “New York money—finance, that kind of thing.”
“New York money? Is that good?”
The question made no sense to him. “The money is good.”
His mouth opened and his head bobbed up and down as his eyes glistened and his chest and shoulders shook. He was laughing, but he was not making a sound, or rather nothing more definable than a strange hissing gasp, a noise like that of air being let out of a bicycle tire.
“Good enough that he sits on every major charitable board in the city. Didn’t know that? The Honorable Charles F. Scarborough is one of the wealthiest men in New York. You thought maybe that was taxpayer money that paid for all that stuff?” A grin full of cheerful malice rippled across the thin line of his mouth. “One of those paintings alone… Taxpayer money? I could indict someone for that,” he said, shaking his head with regret that it was something he had not yet been able to do, if not Scarborough, then some other judge, some other official, someone he could take down, destroy, on behalf of a public always ready to revel in the chronicled corruption of judges and politicians and anyone else who had risen above the crowd. The thought of taking down the famous and formidable Thomas Browning must have come like the ecstatic vision of some cruel and ascetic saint.
“Remember: Carmine’s. Use my name,” he said as he opened the door and burst ahead of me into the courtroom where, as he must have expected, the same crowd of reporters who had come to cover the arraignment was waiting to see what provocative and inflammatory remarks the always reliable Bartholomew Caminetti would give them for the afternoon editions and the early evening news. I watched him sweep off the counsel table the few papers he had brought into court and march out of the courtroom, bristling with forced indignation as he responded to the shouting incoherence with assertions of “heinous crime” and “massive cover-up.”
Jimmy Haviland was where I had left him, hunched over the counsel table, meditating on some distant and fugitive thought of his own, oblivious of the rising chorus that followed the district attorney out the doors behind him. The indictment was lying face down on the place in front of my vacant chair. I picked it up, folded it lengthwise in half, and slipped it inside my coat pocket. I grabbed my briefcase from the floor next to the chair. Haviland did not move. He remained in that bent trance, a faint smile, weary, hopeless, and ineradicable, on his mouth. As gently as I could, I laid my hand on his shoulder and whispered that it was time to go. He nodded as if he were responding to some voice he heard, not now, in the present, and not my voice, but another voice, a voice that often kept him company when he lost himself in the remembered circling labyrinth of his mind.
“We have to go,” I repeated, quietly insistent.
“Yeah, I know,” he said, slowly, and as it were reluctantly, lifting his eyes until they met mine. His mouth twisted with regret. “I made a fool out of myself, didn’t I?”
I peered into his eyes, measuring the depths of his unhappiness, and remembering as I did what he had been like when I first met him and there was nothing tragic about our lives. I laughed a little, and he caught the mood of it and let the mood catch him.
“Yeah, you did,” I said, laughing a little more. “But don’t worry about it. Everybody knows I’m a bigger fool than you.”
Jimmy got to his feet, a glimmer of grateful irreverence shining in his eye. “Damn right. Only a fool would take a case like this.”
The crowd of reporters that had swarmed around Bartholomew Caminetti had followed him out of the building, too intent on getting from him every ruthless, caustic comment they could to remember that in addition to a prosecution every trial had a defense. I might be the best-known defense lawyer in the country, but this was New York, and no one who did not live here could possibly be as interesting or important as someone who did. Until he moved here, Gatsby did not exist.
We walked down the gray deserted hallway and rode the elevator down to the ground floor. Two marshals were escorting a prisoner up the steps at the back of the building, moving in the methodical, practiced, stiff-jointed choreography of a city scene played every day.
Across the street, we cut through Columbus Park, passing wooden tables of huddled Chinese watching with connoisseurs’ eyes a board game played by everyone they ever knew. We were on the edge of Chinatown. Across the street on the other side, in a concession to the lawyers’ trade, was an Irish bar.
Jimmy raised his eyes. “Just one?” he asked. “I’ll buy.”
We sat at the end of a long, shiny bar, two middle-aged men, each nursing a drink an hour before lunch.
“What time is your flight?” I asked for no other reason than to break the silence of Jimmy Haviland’s blank forward stare.
“Don’t have a flight,” he said after he took another lifeless taste. I looked at him. “Didn’t know whether I’d be held. Anyway, doesn’t matter. I’m going to take the train. I used to do that, long time ago—take the train back and forth to New York. Haven’t done it in years.”
“How long does it take?”
“Doesn’t matter. The longer the better. I’m in no hurry to get back. What about you? Your flight this afternoon?”
I was thinking about something else. “Are you sure you don’t remember who was there—besides Browning, besides Annie? Someone who could testify that you left? That you weren’t there when Annie fell?”
He shook his head in disgust. “Sometimes I wonder if I was there; whether I just dreamed I was.” With both elbows on the bar, he stared down at the near-empty glass, trying to remember, to see it again, clearly, the way he must have seen it once.
“I wasn’t interested
in who was there. I went there to see Annie. There were dozens—hundreds—of people around. They were just faces. All I remember for sure is that when I walked into the room—the one right off the suite—they were alone, just the two of them, the way I told you before.”
The bartender approached, ready to pour. Jimmy thought about it for a moment; then, smiling to himself, he covered the glass with both hands and shook his head no.
“Just one,” he said, turning to me, reminding me that he had made a promise and that from now on at least, he would keep the promises he made.
“Let’s get out of here,” I said before that temporary sense of well-being was lost in the empty crying need for just one more before he quit.
We started walking, and the farther we went, the more crowded the sidewalk became until, finally, it was impossible to move without dodging out of someone’s way.
“Listen, I’ve been thinking,” I heard Jimmy say from somewhere behind my shoulder. “About what happened.” With each struggling step his voice became harder to hear. “Maybe it wasn’t an accident. Maybe Annie didn’t fall. Maybe I was right all along: Maybe she was pushed; maybe she was murdered, not on purpose, exactly, but in a moment of rage.”
I stopped and looked behind me. Jimmy was three or four feet away, just a face in the swirling crowd.
“She wasn’t in love with him. She wouldn’t have gone anywhere with him. Maybe he did it—got angry, hit at her, shoved her, pushed her back and she fell. If it wasn’t an accident, if someone did it, it had to have been him.”
“Who?” I shouted as he turned away, buried in the noisy, jostling crowd. “Who?” I asked, though I knew exactly whom he meant.
It was a strange sensation, something I had not experienced before: this hope that someone I was representing on a charge of murder was wrong when, beyond the vague insistence that someone else must have done it, he named the person who had. I wanted Browning to be right; I wanted to believe that the case against Jimmy Haviland was a made-up lie, part of a political conspiracy to drive Browning out of office. I had to believe that, not so much because of Thomas Browning, but because of his wife. If I had not quite realized that before, I understood it the moment I got back to the hotel and was told that there was a message from the vice president’s office. Mrs. Browning wondered whether I might be able to join her for lunch the day after tomorrow in Washington, D.C.
CHAPTER 11
When I was much younger i thought that everyone should fall in love in New York at least once and that probably everyone had. I did, or I almost did, once, a long time ago, that sweltering summer I spent in Manhattan, the summer before my last year in law school. I have been in love, seriously in love, only once; that is not to say that there have not been other occasions when I felt on the verge of it, felt that it could happen again, the way it had that one and only time before. I should have known it would never happen, that you only really fall in love once, but there is nothing quite so forgivable as hope and I had the excuse of my youth. There were times I was desperate to recapture that feeling, to find something that would last, times when it lasted all of a single half-drunken night, laughed off in the blue-gray haze of morning with more than a little regret. There were other times, however, when it was more serious and more lasting than that, when for a while at least all I could think about was the girl, the new one I had found, and every thought of her was wrapped in bright ribbon inside a perfect golden glow. That was what it was like, that summer, when it happened in New York, when I met Joanna and began to think it could happen again, that I could for a second time fall in love.
Joanna had high cheekbones and soft brown hair and dark eyes that could fill with fire or ice, moving from one to the other with breathtaking speed. Always kind to strangers, she could sometimes be cruel to friends; though only, so far as I had occasion to observe, when they had misbehaved in a way that suggested they thought the rules that applied to everyone else did not apply to them. It was, or so I thought at the time, the reaction of girls from fine families who danced and rode horses and went to private shady tree schools, girls who had been bred so finely to the knowledge of what was always the right thing to do that by a second instinct— sharper, more natural than the first—they could give the appearance that they were doing it precisely when they were not. In the privileged circles in which Joanna moved with such comfortable ease, appearances were everything and respectability meant mainly not getting caught. It was, I suppose, part of the attraction, one of the things about her that made her irresistible: the sense that behind that façade of polished, irreproachable good manners, that look of studied indifference, someone was waiting to see if you were willing to take a chance.
I am sure it was that, or something like it, because the first time we met I did not like her at all. It was at a small gathering arranged by Thomas Browning for some reason that seemed important at the time, but perhaps had no importance at all and I only think it did because Browning was in New York and wanted me to attend.
We had spent a fair amount of time together in Cambridge while law school was in session, but that was pretty much all. Whether it had been Thanksgiving of my second, or my third, year; whether it was the year before, or the year after, Zachary Stern died, I had been invited to the fabled family estate in Grosse Pointe only once. The summer after our first year, Browning disappeared, to Europe mainly, but other places as well. I would sometimes get postcards from remote locations in Asia or Australia, and once, I think, from São Paulo, Brazil, with short, funny remarks about the burden of learning the foreign part of the auto business in languages he did not always understand. The next summer he was traveling again, but he had a week or two before he left and he was spending it at home, in New York.
When I arrived after work, everyone was already there, sitting around a large table in the back of Maxwell’s Plum. Thomas Browning was telling them that the only thing worse than the prospect of having to go into the family business was the thought of practicing law.
“But here comes Antonelli, fashionably late,” he announced with a languid grin as I finished twisting my way through crowded tables and settled into the last vacant chair. Browning was the only one I knew. The others were strangers, but obviously friends of his. I felt myself under the appraising glance of people, all about my age, who were clearly wondering exactly where I fit in. I had caught the tail end of his last remark. I returned his slightly irreverent smile.
“For those of us who don’t have a family business to go into, it’s called getting home from work.”
They seemed to hold their collective breath, waiting for Browning’s reaction before they made the hazard of their own. Browning had an instinct for everything. Without a moment’s delay, without that slight hesitation that would have suggested he was masking with politeness what he really felt, he made a grand sweeping gesture and threw back his head.
“Meet Joseph Antonelli, the only son of a bitch with guts enough always to tell me the truth! Somebody get him a drink.”
And suddenly everyone wanted to be my friend. Or almost everyone. Sitting directly across from me, Joanna Van Renaessler, introduced by Browning as an old family friend, looked at me with a raised eyebrow and a skeptical smile. She did not believe for a minute what Browning had just said.
“I don’t know that I’ve ever heard of anyone who always tells the truth.”
A kind of hard shrewdness glittered in her eyes, like the look of a seasoned gambler who has lost too often not to calculate the odds. I was being patronized, but more than that, challenged to show if I had something of my own to stand on and was not just another one of Thomas Browning’s temporary friends. That was the feeling I had, that she found something suspect about anyone she had not known for years—anyone who was not an “old family friend”—because anyone Browning met more recently was not someone he should trust. Though she did not know it, I had come to the same conclusion myself. I had seen the way people tried to get close to him because he was Thomas
Stern Browning and he could do something for them.
There was noise everywhere, laughter and voices and tinkling glass. The others at the table were leaning one way and the other, starting conversations of their own. We were at the end of the table farthest from where Browning was carrying on what appeared to be separate conversations with the two well-dressed young women sitting on each side. His half-closed eyes kept coming back to us. I had the feeling he had arranged things this way, that I would be sitting across from Joanna and he could watch the fun. He would have done it without malice, without intending the slightest harm, just to see the way things worked when two people of such different backgrounds were thrown together in a situation where at least for a while they could not get apart. Perhaps it was more than curiosity that made him do it; perhaps his interest ran deeper than that; perhaps, though I did not know it then and would not suspect it until a long time later, he thought it held some lesson for himself.
I was going to law school on a scholarship and worked part-time and in the summer for the money I needed to get by. My family was not famous and could not trace itself back more than a generation or two. A hundred years ago we were politely called recent immigrants and, not so politely and rather more often, daigos, wops, and worse. Joanna Van Renaessler came from a family whose ancestors had practically invented America, a family that had been rich for so many generations that they could not quite remember how it had all started, whether from selling what had become Rhode Island or trading some part of New Jersey instead.
“I don’t know if I’ve ever heard of anyone who always tells the truth,” repeated Joanna, more amused than annoyed at my silence.
“You seem as though you’d be disappointed if you did. Why?” I asked as she got ready to say something in anger. “Because you’re so certain they would have to be boring and uninteresting, without any secrets to hide— nothing they felt a need to conceal.”