Dead Man's Thoughts

by Carolyn Wheat

  I didn’t wait around to find out what it went to show. I muttered, “Have to run, Judge,” and ducked out the door, breathing a sigh of relief.

  Of the two, I definitely preferred Tyrone.

  Normally, I hate entering the Brooklyn House of Detention for Men. It’s a big gloomy building that looms over Atlantic Avenue. But today I was so keyed up at the prospect of seeing Charlie that I rushed up to the double-strength front door and knocked eagerly. I was let in by a correction officer. I went to the desk and handed my notice to the warden to the officer there. The notice identified me as Charlie’s attorney. I told myself I was not here under false pretenses; the Legal Aid Society was Charlie’s attorney of record, and I was a Legal Aid lawyer. Besides, I’d probably get Flaherty to assign me officially to the case on Monday. I signed into the two visitors’ books and showed my Legal Aid card, then waited on a bench while they went up to the cell block to get Charlie.

  As I waited, I wondered how Charlie would be. Would he have heard of Nathan’s death? If so, his paranoia would be totally out of control. But there was a chance he hadn’t, in which case he might be willing to talk. Either way, I had to prevail on him to tell me what he’d told Nathan. The thought began to occur to me that knowing the information that had killed Nathan might not be good for my own health, but before I could examine it, the correction officer was back.

  He was angry. “What is this, lady, a joke?”

  “What do you mean? I’m Blackwell’s lawyer.”

  “Not anymore you ain’t. Don’tcha read the papers, lady? Blackwell hung himself in his cell last night.”

  ELEVEN

  At first I just stood there, numb clear through. On top of everything else, this was just too much. Then, as I grabbed my bag and waited for the iron door to open and let me out, too many thoughts crowded in at once.

  Like the fact that I should have seen it coming. If Nathan had been killed because of what Charlie Blackwell had told him, how could the murderer leave Blackwell alive? No matter how much you scared him, Blackwell was dangerously unpredictable. I recalled his nervous, twitching hands, his stammering panic. Poor little guy. He knew it was coming, but he couldn’t get out of the way.

  I didn’t believe for a minute that Charlie had hanged himself. For one thing, he was so single-minded about getting protection. What did he need protection for if he was planning to do the job himself? Plus, I couldn’t accept the coincidence. The only two people who knew what Blackwell had to tell the Special Prosecutor died by violence. One day apart. The connection was obvious. I’d have to get back to Button. Maybe he wasn’t impressed with the missing notebook, but this would convince him to consider what I was saying.

  For a brief moment I wondered how they had gotten through the web of administrative segregation–suicide watch that I’d put around Charlie, then dismissed the thought. The mob had their methods.

  Much as I hated the thought of going back to the office, I had to get to a phone and call Button. Reluctantly, I turned toward downtown Brooklyn and made my way along Court Street.

  As usual, the street was jammed with people. Shoppers. Office workers. Lawyers. I turned as a familiar voice called my name.

  It was Paul Trentino. Ex-Legal Aid attorney. Ex-lover. Since we broke up three years ago, I hadn’t seen much of him. Less so after he and Pete Kalisch started in private practice together. Which was just as well, as ours had been the kind of office romance that gets messy when it’s over. The people who’d sided with him still treated me with coolness. And vice versa, I suppose.

  He walked up to me, the concern on his face showing through the mask of politeness he usually wore at our infrequent meetings.

  “Cass. I’m really sorry. What a terrible thing.”

  “Thanks, Paul,” I said. I had to swallow to keep down the lump forming in my throat. The sympathy in Paul’s voice was so warm, so unexpected, that it brought back sharply the reasons I’d been fond of him.

  “Hey, listen,” Paul said, touching my hand. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to get you upset.”

  I shook my head. “No,” I replied, my voice shaky, “it’s not you. It’s just—” I broke off. The tears that I’d kept down through the work day were welling up now, not to be denied.

  Paul looked around at the swirling crowds on Court Street. Poor guy, I thought. He just wants to say a couple of polite words to an old friend, and suddenly he’s stuck with a crazy woman, crying on the street, in full view of the entire Brooklyn bar.

  “Let’s go in here,” Paul said quickly, shepherding me into a dimly-lit coffee shop. Passing the counter, he led me to the farthest booth, sat me down, and ordered coffee for both of us.

  Finally the tears stopped. I still snuffled a little, my breath catching in my throat every so often, but I felt lighter. As though an anvil had been taken out of my chest.

  “Thanks,” I smiled at Paul, “I needed that.”

  He smiled back. It was the first genuine, unrestrained smile I’d seen since we broke up. It felt good to rediscover a friend. Especially now.

  “Oh, God, Paul. I feel so damn—I don’t know. Fragile. Helpless. Confused. First the shock of losing Nathan. Then the awful things they’re saying.” Paul nodded, a wry twist to his mouth. “And now, Charlie Blackwell’s dead.”

  “Who the hell is Charlie Blackwell?”

  I told him. When I finished, Paul knit his eyebrows in thought and said, “What do the police think?”

  “They didn’t think much of the suggestion before,” I admitted. “But now—”

  “Didn’t the correction officer at BHD say suicide?”

  “Yes, but what if it was made to look like suicide?”

  “Or what if this Blackwell heard the news about Nathan and got cold feet?”

  “If Charlie was scared, wouldn’t he ask for more protection? Instead, he kills himself to save his enemies the trouble?”

  Paul shrugged. “Could be. Anyway,” he said, looking at his watch, “I’m sorry, Cass, but I really have to run. Important client waiting upstairs.”

  “That’s right,” I remembered, “your office is in this building.” While we waited for the check, I asked the obligatory question, “How do you like private practice?”

  “Love it.” The wide smile confirmed his words. “I’m my own boss. I’m building something for the future. For the first time in my life, I feel like a grownup.”

  “Sounds great,” I lied. It sounded awful. Feeling like a grownup has never been my favorite thing. And never less so than now. I would have given anything to go back to the Popcorn Shop in Chagrin Falls, eating popcorn balls and playing beside the waterfall. Far away from robbery, arson, murder.

  I gave Paul a warm goodbye. We agreed to have lunch someday and meant it.

  Back at Legal Aid, I went straight to my office, skipping the little groups of people around the secretaries’ desks, talking about Nathan. I had more important things to do than talk.

  I called Button. I told him about Blackwell, who he’d been and why his death was linked to Nathan’s.

  “You say he hanged himself, Miss Jameson?” Trust Button to go straight to the weak point.

  “That’s what the correction officer said. But how hard would it be for someone to do it for him?”

  “I don’t know. I’ll talk to whoever’s handling the case over here. Thanks for calling.”

  Before he could hang up, I got in a couple of questions. Did they know yet how Nathan had died? They did. The autopsy report wasn’t in yet, but the unofficial word was strangulation. Manual. Any trace of drugs? No, Nathan had been conscious when he died. That news hit me so hard I almost didn’t get out my next question. My mind was filled with the thought of Nathan going to his death knowing what was happening every minute. No blessed unconsciousness, no quietly going to sleep and not waking up.

  What about the blood on the towel? Not Nathan’s. But that was all they knew. There was nothing to show that it might have belonged to the murderer. They would
check under Nathan’s fingernails to see whether he could have scratched his assailant, but it hadn’t been done yet. As to the magazines, there had been no usable prints, even on the slicks. I asked Button pointedly if that wasn’t unusual, but he declined the bait. He just said, “Not necessarily,” in a bland voice and thanked me for calling.

  I took the subway home mechanically, hardly aware of changing to the local at Chambers Street. I stepped off the train at Sheridan Square, the heart of Greenwich Village.

  I crossed Seventh Avenue and walked along Grove Street till I came to my little red brick townhouse. I picked up my mail—a letter from Ron. I walked up the long curved, carpeted staircase to the top floor rear, opened the door, tossed my things on a chair and sat down to read the latest from my brother.

  hi kid—

  big news today. frankie manzoni, the guy i was telling you about, won his lawsuit. he can move out on his own with full state subsidy unless the v.a. can prove at a hearing that he’s incapable of functioning, which they won’t be able to do. so with any luck at all, your big brother might finally get his own apartment at the tender age of 34. rick bannister wants to move in with frankie, and gene kavanaugh and i have been talking about being the next ones out. he’s got the use of one arm, so he does the dishes. wish me luck.

  so how’s by you, as they say where you live? still feeling the job’s a bummer? too bad, cassie, i thought when you went to law school that your dreams were coming true. but i guess there’s always room for new dreams, isn’t there, kid? keep dreaming. i know they’ll come true.

  loveandkisses,

  ron

  I felt like a prize bitch. My brother lived in a V.A. hospital in Brecksville, near the Cleveland suburb where we’d grown up. He was a quadriplegic who typed his letters by using a stick in his mouth to hit the keys. That’s why he didn’t shift and used the slash for a question mark. And here I’d sounded off to him about my stupid, trivial dissatisfaction with being a lawyer. When being a lawyer had been his dream before Vietnam. Now his dream had shrunk to being able to leave the hospital where he’d spent the last nine years of his life.

  I pulled a yellow pad out of my briefcase and began to write. At least this time the problems I burdened him with wouldn’t be trivial ones. I wrote fast and furiously, filling sheets of paper with large, sprawly handwriting. I wanted him to understand how I felt, how important it was for me to find the truth about Nathan and clear his name. Clear his name—that sounded so melodramatic, like a thirties movie. But it was true. I didn’t want people dismissing Nathan, using the sordid circumstances of his death to forget what he’d been in life. Like Flaherty was doing.

  TWELVE

  Burton Stone. He was the key. I’d decided that as I lay in bed the night before, tossing and turning, my mind racing like a motor I couldn’t turn off. Try as I might, I couldn’t stop seeing Nathan’s last moments in my imagination. The chilling knowledge. The futile struggle. The final despair. And if Burton Stone was why, I had to learn everything I could about him.

  I took the subway to Times Square. The New York Public Library Annex on West 43rd Street should have everything I want, I told myself, as I walked toward the Hudson, through the neighborhood they’d once called Hell’s Kitchen. Now it looked more like Hell’s Drawing Room. Fancy restaurants, high-rise co-ops. What they call gentrification. I didn’t see any gentry, though. The streets were empty, except for the Communists.

  They stood in front of a Depression-style building passing out literature. The youngest of them looked about seventy. Men with wrinkled faces and bright birds’ eyes. One woman with white hair and stout old lady shoes. Was this the life Nathan’s father had led? I stopped, took a Daily World, and gave a dollar to one of the men. He smiled at me. “Intensify the struggle,” he said.

  “By any means necessary,” I answered. I hadn’t exchanged slogans like that since my SDS days at Kent. I hadn’t cared about anything as passionately since then either. Until now. Until Nathan’s killer had to be found.

  Much to my surprise and delight, the library still had real newsprint. Not microfilm. I got my hands dirty, but I didn’t care. It was nice to have the feel of yellowing pulp, the sense of immediacy a real newspaper brings, unfiltered by the electronic marvels of the 1980s.

  When I’d had enough, I packed my notes into my shoulder bag and went out to look for a restaurant. There was a fancy-looking place in the ground floor of one of the high-rises. I took a table near the window and spread my notes on the butcher block. I ordered a bloody mary and a BLT, thinking of Flaherty as I asked for extra mayonnaise. It would have been good to have someone to do this with, to help me unravel the implications I’d read between the lines.

  It was a fairly standard if sordid picture that emerged from the articles. Burton Stone, whom even the News (but not the Times) called The Fixer, was alleged to have taken bribes from various construction companies around the city. In return for those manila envelopes, Stone used his influence with boards, committees, agencies, etcetera. And he had a lot of influence with a lot of people.

  Unfortunately for Stone, one of the construction companies used Charlie Blackwell as its delivery boy. Not only did Charlie tell all when he got busted for a petty scam, but he went to the last meeting wired for sound. Of course, Stone was no dummy. Like the others, the last meeting took place in a men’s room, so all the tape got was the sound of running water and flushing. So it came down to Charlie’s word against Stone’s at the trial. Not that there wasn’t secondary evidence—Stone’s bank accounts, the votes he’d cast on his numerous boards and committees, the clients he’d represented. It all added up. But the only direct proof that he’d ever taken a bribe was the testimony of Charlie Blackwell. Charlie was guarded like the Crown Jewels. Every other edition had a picture of the sharply handsome Special Prosecutor, Del Parma, promising the public that Charlie would be safe until he took the stand. The papers played it for all it was worth, stressing the danger to Charlie, the significance of his testimony. You got the feeling they were all living for the day when Charlie would be killed. Then they could use the headline “Key Witness Gunned Down.”

  As I read, I sipped my bloody mary and made notes for future activities. Just how well had Charlie been guarded? Where had he been kept? Who had had access to him? If Nathan’s insinuation had been correct, Matt Riordan, Stone’s lawyer, had supposedly gotten to Blackwell. The question was how. I resolved to find out.

  The famous cross-examination had been described in all the papers, but I hadn’t copied much of it. I preferred to see it whole, in the trial transcript. There had to be things even a reporter might miss that I as a trial lawyer would pick up. I looked forward to reading it; the papers had reviewed Riordan’s performance as though it had been Al Pacino’s.

  As I ate my sandwich, I mentally reviewed what the papers had said about the outcome of the trial. All had blamed it on the Special Prosecutor, pointing out the flimsiness of a case made out solely by a witness who turns out to be not only a professional informer but a free-lance crazy. As Del Parma himself had tried the case, I figured he’d been good and mad. I hoped he was still mad enough eight years later to tell me what I wanted to know. Having his star witness this time destroyed not figuratively by cross-examination but literally by murder might put him in a talkative mood.

  Feeling as though I’d put in a good day, I ordered coffee, put the notes away, and tried to think about something else. It wasn’t easy.

  One of the things I was trying not to think about was Nathan’s funeral. It was to be held tomorrow in Westchester, where his ex-wife and children lived. Should I go?

  In the end, I decided not to. Instead, I did something I hadn’t done since the last time I spent Christmas with Grandma Winchell in Ohio. I went to church. I’m not sure what impulse brought me there. I guess I needed a ritual. I needed to close something. To say goodbye. To take a piece of time and make it special by filling it with Nathan.

  At first the service brought me
little more than fresh pain. My eyes teared up at every hymn, since they all brought back childhood memories. Then I moved straight into guilt. I had left Nathan deliberately our last morning together, knowing he needed to talk but preferring not to accept whatever confidence he intended to share. Because I liked our relationship light. Because there was a limit to what I felt for him. Because I could no more commit myself to him than to my chosen profession.

  As the tears flowed silently down my cheeks, I thought of the last Zen story he had told me. Concentration and compassion. Concentration I would use to the utmost to find the truth, that I resolved. And compassion—could I find that for whoever killed him? I doubted it.

  I left the church with a sense of something too nebulous to be called peace. But I did feel as if the intense mourning had ended—maybe I’d even stop waking up in tears every morning—and the harder task of adjusting to day-to-day life without Nathan would begin.

  Flaherty told me about the funeral. “The rabbi was awful, Cass,” he said angrily. “Oily bastard. He’d obviously never even met Nathan.”

  “What about the family?” I asked. I’d already explained to Flaherty why I didn’t go. I couldn’t stand the thought of sobbing in the back pew like the Other Woman in a goddamn Bette Davis movie.

  “The ex-wife was there,” he said. “She looked more disgusted than grief-stricken. And there were the two sons. And Nathan’s father.”

  The Communist. I wished I had gone to the funeral, if only to meet him.

  “He was pretty pathetic,” Flaherty went on. “A shaky old guy. He broke down at the cemetery. Refused to leave the grave site. Said he couldn’t abandon his son when it took so long for them to find each other.”