“But if the cops think—” she began.
“That’s just it! The cops will waste their time looking for some mythical Midnight Cowboy and all the time whoever did it will be walking around scot-free.”
“What can you do?” Dorinda asked.
“I don’t know,” I answered. I was unbearably tired, but it was only five o’clock. Dorinda offered dinner, but I asked her if I could lie down instead. She took me into the bedroom, turned down the quilts on her bed, and hugged me. Very motherly. A feeling of security came over me.
The bed was warm and comforting. The quilts were homey-smelling, heavy, protective. Yet I lay awake, stiff with anxiety and pain. I remembered my last night with Nathan. How he’d spoken for the first time about his breakdown. How he’d wanted to tell me something else. How I’d run out the next morning before he’d had a chance. And now I’d never hear it.
My thoughts grew morbid. Nathan’s last moments. Had he lain on the bed, his mind flailing in agony, in the certain knowledge that death was coming? Had he been afraid? Or was it like those stories told by people who were clinically dead but recovered—were there beautiful, white-clad illusions to help him into death? And had he thought of me?
I was startled by a touch on my face. It was the little calico cat. She burrowed under the quilts and curled herself up against my chest, purring like a furry toy. I made myself a nest around her, enveloping her in my larger warmth, hugging her as tightly as she would let me. It was good to feel life.
NINE
I awoke early, with a huge heavy lump in my chest. I lay in Dorinda’s bed, the little cat still on one side of me, my sleeping friend on the other. My mind a near-perfect blank. I wanted to cry, but no tears would come.
I stayed at Dorinda’s for breakfast. My taste buds at least were back to normal; I wished to God she drank real coffee instead of some horrible herbal brew with star anise in it.
Then I trudged up the hill toward the Promenade. The fog was so dense I could hardly see the city. The scene reminded me of a morning I’d spent on Cape Cod. The fog had been so thick I couldn’t tell where the crashing ocean waves ended and the rolling fog began. I’d tried to capture it on film, but all I’d gotten were meaningless gray photographs and a skylight filter full of salt spray.
Lousy as the weather was, it was perfect for mourning. I sat on a bench, not caring that its wetness immediately began to seep through my lined raincoat. I wanted to cry, freely, unrestrained by having to maintain composure in front of anyone. But I still couldn’t cry.
Slowly, unbidden, images of Nathan came to me. Nathan at a block fair, trying on a George Raft hat and looking, as I told him, like a Jewish hit man. I saw him in that hat, and I laughed and then cried, sobs bursting from me like an exploding boiler. Nathan at the bench, shrugging, wheedling, schmoozing to get one of his kids into a program instead of Riker’s. And I’d told Button he didn’t have special relationships with clients! What would the detective’s sleazy coplike mind think when he found out Nathan had actually had clients to his house? Then, I recalled Nathan in bed, his gentle hands touching me. Finally, Nathan in death, his body splayed and tied by malicious hands.
I must have used thirty Kleenexes. I’d used a few twice. They sat in a sodden heap at the end of the bench. I picked them up and threw them into an empty trash barrel, where they fell, with a muffled, hollow thud.
My grieving over, at least for the moment, I turned my thoughts to the question Dorinda had asked me the night before. If I really believed Nathan had been killed by someone other than a gay lover, what was I prepared to do about it?
Button wouldn’t listen to me. Why should he? I had nothing concrete, no evidence that any other motive existed for Nathan’s murder.
Motive. If it wasn’t sexual, what was it? Not robbery—a robber would have hit Nathan over the head or stabbed him or shot him. Not tied him to the bed and wasted time wrecking the place. Ruining things of value instead of taking them.
No, the cops were right in one sense. The scene had been set to look like the work of a gay pickup who freaked out. The magazines had been planted. The tying up was to complete the picture. Kinky sex gone wrong.
That’s a defense, kinky sex gone wrong. Flaherty used it once in a trial. The victim—we defense lawyers usually say “complaining witness,” but this was a victim—was raped with a broom handle. It was up to Flaherty to persuade the jury that the woman and his client were into weird sex and things had just gotten out of hand. No rape, just kinky sex gone wrong. It made me sick at the time, but Flaherty just said, “That’s the job, Cass. Do it or don’t do it.”
Now the cops were fastening that kinky sex label on Nathan.
I couldn’t let them. I knew the truth, knew that Nathan was not an exploiter, sexual or otherwise. I had to prove it. But how?
Back to motive. Why does someone kill a lawyer? Could the motive lie somewhere in Nathan’s caseload?
If so, there was only one case that filled the bill. Charlie Blackwell. Face it, Legal Aid lawyers represent wife-beaters, junkies, muggers, crazies. How often do we pick up a client with heavy mob connections, with information destined for the Special Prosecutor? Information so hot that it puts his own life in danger?
Only instead of Charlie, they had murdered Nathan. Murdered him because he’d talked to Charlie? Because he knew what Charlie intended to tell the Special Prosecutor?
My pulse quickened. I had to get to the office—to Nathan’s office—to see Blackwell’s file. To see Charlie himself at the Brooklyn House. I stood up from the bench, stretched my stiff muscles, and strode toward the office.
On the way, I bought coffee and the paper. The story was on page 7. LAWYER’S BODY FOUND IN BKLYN HEIGHTS APT. My name wasn’t mentioned. I supposed I had Button to thank for that. The thought galled me, but I had to give credit where it was due. At least I wouldn’t have reporters calling me all morning, as I had when I arraigned the guy they’d labeled the Bensonhurst Slasher three years ago. When I got to the part where it said the body had been found in a “sunny, plant-filled apartment,” my eyes filled with tears. The plants had been my idea. I’d helped Nathan clear a space by the window and fill it with marble chips. Then we’d spent a Saturday in the plant district on Sixth Avenue in Manhattan picking out trees and such. False aralia, schefflera, rubber plants, giant dieffenbachia, palms, a couple of figs—it was a little jungle. The last time I’d seen it, the plants had been ripped from their pots and the dirt thrown over everything in the living room.
The office was like a morgue. Lily, Ramona, and the other secretaries sat at their desks, dabbing at their eyes with Kleenexes. Ramona motioned me into the lunchroom, where the lawyers were.
Flaherty sat at one end of the table, a cup of milky coffee and two Danishes in front of him. His blue eyes were red-rimmed. They teared up as I came over to him. I put my arms around his bulk and kissed him. He squeezed my hand.
“God, Cass, what an awful thing,” he said. His voice nearly broke. I set my coffee down and sat next to him.
The others in the room were in better control than Flaherty, but just barely. Bill Pomerantz had the paper open, shaking his head as though he thought they might have made the whole thing up.
Jackie Bohan blew her nose and said, “I can’t believe it. Nathan of all people.”
“I just hope I don’t pick up any fucking burglary cases today,” Mario said bitterly. His mouth was ugly with hate. “If I have to represent some fucking burglar the day after a friend of mine gets killed by one.…”
Flaherty cut him off. “That’s your job,” he said, his voice hard. “Don’t confuse your grief for Nathan with anything else, okay?”
Mario stalked out of the room, muttering, “Just don’t ask me to get ’em out of jail. Not today.”
Bill looked up from the paper, a disgusted look on his face. “Christ, what shit this is,” he said. “You were right, Pat. They don’t actually say it, but they hint like hell.”
“What do
you mean?” I asked, alarmed. I’d bought the paper because I was afraid of what they might say, but as far as I could see nothing had been said about Button’s Midnight Cowboy theory.
Flaherty’s voice was bitter. “It’s subtle. But it’s clear to anyone with a certain type of mind. ‘Bachelor apartment.’ ‘No sign of forced entry.’ ‘Bound hand and foot on the bed.’ It all adds up to ‘fag killing,’ doesn’t it?”
“Flaherty,” I said softly, trying to keep it between the two of us. “I was Nathan’s lover. Don’t you think I would have known if he was—like that?”
He looked at me, an expression of pure misery on his normally humorous face. “I don’t know, Cass. I want to believe you, but what about this?” He gestured at the paper. “It does look like he knew whoever killed him. He let the killer in, and he let—” his voice choked, “he let himself be tied up. How can you explain that?”
I couldn’t. He went on. “Oh, God, Cass.” His voice was achingly tight, and his face was pinched with pain. “I can’t help but wonder—did Nathan have a whole side to his personality that none of us knew about? A dark side?”
“That business of having clients come to his house—” Sylvia began.
“It was dangerous,” Bill agreed. “Stupid.”
“Maybe he was, like, courting death,” Sylvia offered. “A death wish. Unconsciously setting himself up. You know what I mean?”
“Whoever did it must have really hated him,” Jackie said. “The way his apartment was destroyed. A real psycho.”
Flaherty looked at me, an appeal in his vivid blue eyes. Eyes that usually laughed and now could hardly keep from crying. “I feel betrayed,” he whispered.
So did I. But not by Nathan. By the people I’d thought were his friends and who now stood ready to throw away everything they’d known about him in life, to erase all that for one moment, frozen by death.
Even Flaherty believed the lies of that last moment, not the truth of the living man he’d known and loved. I got up and walked out of the lunchroom without looking back.
TEN
Nathan’s office already had a forlorn, abandoned look. Just my imagination—or Nathan’s habitual neatness—I told myself.
There was a little book on the corner of his desk. A paperback, beautifully put together by a small press, with a Japanese brush painting on the gray cover. Zen in the Art of Photography. I picked it up. Nathan had written in the flyleaf: “For Cass. You are the Photographer/You are the Photograph. Love, Nathan.” I crumpled into Nathan’s chair, put my arms down on his desk, and cried.
After a few minutes, I dried my tears and stood up. Then I went to the file cabinet and looked under “B.” Blackwell’s file was right there. There was nothing in it but the court papers, neatly stapled onto the folder. No notes.
This was serious. I knew Nathan had seen Blackwell at the House of Detention Wednesday; both Charlie and Nathan himself had said so. If I needed to, I could verify the visit by looking at the sign-in register at the jail. And yet there were no notes of the meeting in the file. The meeting had to have been pretty damn significant if Nathan was afraid to commit the details to paper. It’s like when you have a client who’s giving evidence to the cops. You approach the bench and put the facts of his cooperation on the record out of the hearing of the audience. You don’t want the world to know the guy’s an informer. Similarly, Nathan didn’t want Charlie’s file to contain information too hot to handle, in case the wrong people got a look at it. The blank file was in its negative way a confirmation that I was on to something.
But my mind rebelled at the thought that conscientious Nathan would have kept the whole thing in his head. If he didn’t trust a Legal Aid file, fine, but he would have made some notes somewhere, if only to protect himself if Charlie should get an attack of nerves and start denying everything. But where were those notes? I was about to ransack the office when I recalled that Nathan had gone to the Brooklyn House on Wednesday. And by Thursday, yesterday, he was dead. He hadn’t been to the office since seeing Charlie.
Were the notes in his apartment? If so, was that the reason for the destruction? No, I decided. The destruction was too wholesale for that. And where would the notes have been? Had the murderer gotten them or were they still there? I decided to call Button, distasteful as the prospect was, to find out.
Then I remembered Nathan’s spiral notebook. The one he always carried in his breast pocket. In it he kept such things as grocery lists, to-do lists, phone numbers, book titles, and information about his extracurricular clients. That’s where he would have written shorthand notes of his meeting with Charlie. I was sure of it. I’d call Button and ask if such a notebook had been found. If it had, it would confirm my suspicion that something Charlie had told Nathan had been the murder motive. If the notebook was missing, it would go a long way toward disproving the Midnight Cowboy theory. What would a gay pickup want with Nathan’s notebook?
Even though there was nothing in it, I took Blackwell’s file back to my office with me. I’d get a notice to the warden in Supreme Court and go to the Brooklyn House of Detention as soon as I’d covered my cases for the day.
I called Button before I left for court. By some miracle, he was in. He barked his hello, and I tried to collect my thoughts.
“Detective Button? This is Cassandra Jameson. About the Nathan Wasserstein case?”
“Yes, I remember.” There was a hint of dryness in his tone, but I had neither the time nor the inclination to follow it up.
“I’ve just been in Mr. Wasserstein’s office here at the Legal Aid Society and I think maybe something is missing. Did you or your men find a pocket-sized spiral notebook in the apartment?”
“Miss Jameson, you saw that place. Only the Sanitation Department could help it. We haven’t been looking for one little notebook. Why do you think it’s important?”
I took a deep breath. This was the hard part. “If Nathan wasn’t killed by some gay pickup, then it’s more than likely he was killed because of a case he was handling. It involved a very heavy witness, and Nathan may have written some notes about a conversation with this witness in the notebook. If the notebook is there, it might have the notes of that conversation, which would lead to the murderer.”
“If it contains incriminating notes, why would your hypothetical murderer leave it there?”
“Maybe he didn’t know about it. But even if it’s gone, doesn’t that prove something? It proves that there was something in it the murderer didn’t want found.”
“Miss Jameson, I appreciate that you’re very upset about your friend’s death and that you’d like very much for the murderer to be somebody other than a gay pickup, but facts are facts. If this notebook is not in the apartment, and the murderer, whoever he is, has it, then we won’t find the notebook till we find the killer, in which case the contents of the notebook will be somewhat superfluous. And all it will probably contain is the street name and phone number of a gay hustler.”
I had to confess I hadn’t thought of that. “But will you at least look for it?”
“To the extent that we can spare the time,” he sighed. “But even you admit the notebook only might be there and only might be important. That’s too many mights for me to spend a lot of time and resources on. Anyway, thanks for calling. Let me know if you think of anything else.”
Even though the last words sounded like something of a formula, I was glad he’d said them. I had every intention of calling him again after I’d talked to Charlie. By that time, I ought to have the original information, which would be as good as or better than the notebook itself.
I did one more thing before I left for court. I drafted a writ to be heard by the Appellate Division for Digna Gonzalez. I’d get her out of jail no matter how many courts I had to go to.
People were still huddled in shocked bunches as I left the office. Everyone felt the loss. Everyone felt the pain.
Nathan’s murder was also the number one topic of conversation in the courth
ouse. I wasn’t ready to discuss it, so I just did my cases and left. On the way out of Supreme, I picked up the notice to the warden that would allow me to visit Charlie at the Brooklyn House of Detention.
Criminal Court was harder than Supreme. I almost cried again, talking to Tim, the AP4 bridgeman. “He was a real gentleman,” Tim said sadly. “He really cared about his clients, and he treated everybody right.” It was the best epitaph I’d heard yet.
Just when I’d finished my cases and was about to step out the back way to BHD, I heard a voice calling me.
“Yo! Miss Jameson! Yo!” I wheeled around. It was Tyrone Blake.
“Hey, man, save that ‘Yo’ stuff for the street corner, will you?” I told him. “I’m your fucking lawyer, for Christ’s sake. What are you doing here, anyway? Your sentence date isn’t till next month.”
“I got me a new case.”
“Oh, no! Another car, I suppose.”
“I thought the car was legal. Honest!”
“That’s the trouble with you, Tyrone. You think a lot of cars are legal.”
“This time I knowed the car was okay. These dudes was friends of mine. They done called me over to fix they car on account of I’m the best mechanic in Coney Island. So I be lookin’ in the engine when the cops come down on us. They all split, Miss Jameson, leavin’ me by the side of the car with a wrench in my hand. I didn’t even run away ’cause I knowed that car legal. Only, it ain’t.”
“This is the story of your fuckin’ life, Tyrone. You just blew your probation on the other case, unless you beat this or do some fast talking at your sentencing. When’s your next date, and who’s the lawyer on your new case?”
I wrote the information down in my own pocket notebook, having caught the habit from Nathan. As I said good-bye to Tyrone, I added, “And stay away from cars. As far as you’re concerned, ain’t none of ’em legal.”
After Tyrone walked away, I turned toward the back door. I was passing the judges’ elevator, when I was accosted again, this time by Judge Di Anci. “Wasn’t it a shame about Nate Wasserstein?” he asked, with more than a hint of suppressed excitement on his face. “I hear he was tied up when the police got there. Is that true?” I told him curtly I didn’t know, but he went on. “Such a terrible thing. A man like that, works for the poor, and one of them kills him. Just goes to show, doesn’t it?”
Dead Man's Thoughts Page 6