The light fixtures were all from antiques shops. They didn’t match, but they all had character and style from the 1950s. Her aunt had already had the working jukebox that used to play its records for nickels and quarters. She thought her niece would enjoy having it and moved it into a corner of Michele’s bedroom. She had asked if she wanted her own TV, and Michele had told her it wasn’t necessary. She liked to read herself to sleep. To soften the atmosphere further, Aunt Eve had bought two large pink area rugs.
“Pink,” she told Michele, “will calm and relax you. It neutralizes disorder, and you’ll need to come home to it every day from the work you do.”
“Thank you, Aunt Eve,” Michele said.
“I know you’re skeptical, dear, but you’ll see.”
It did give her a good feeling. That was all she was prepared to admit.
She dropped her briefcase next to the desk chair and plopped into the dark blue heavy-cushioned easy chair that her aunt had rescued from a charity thrift shop. There was just one tiny rip under the left arm, but the seat was still remarkably firm. Her aunt was certain someone had died in it and that it had been donated simply because of that. Michele knew her mother wouldn’t permit it near her home, much less take it in and use it, even if that story was only a rumor; she would drive an additional five miles to avoid passing a cemetery.
“How do you know someone died in it, Aunt Eve?” she had asked.
“The dead leave something behind, a stain in the form of a shadow.”
“That only you can see?”
“There are others who can see it. I just happen to be one of them, yes. If you don’t want it in your bedroom . . .”
“No, that’s fine,” Michele said. “It’s very comfortable.”
“I thought so,” her aunt said, smiling.
Actually, her body felt as if it was comfortably softening and settling as the tension began to dissipate. Late in the afternoon, she’d had a meeting with Eleanor Rozwell and District Attorney Barrett. The information she had brought back after her lunch with Lieutenant Blake wiped some of the confidence off their faces. She could sense that Mike Barrett especially had wanted her to have a fairly easy first prosecution. She was, after all, prosecuting for the first time in New York City.
Michele was even more convinced now that New Yorkers believed everything was different there. They were arrogant about it. Whether it was restaurants or theater, this was where you would experience the best. That applied to jurisprudence, too. In their eyes, a murder trial in jurisdictions outside the city was just not as intense or as complicated. For one thing, the media coverage was better, because just as the best cooks and performers came to work in the city, so did the best TV and newspaper reporters.
Both the DA and Eleanor Rozwell made it clear that Michele’s performance in court would be reviewed with the same cold scrutiny used by critics reviewing an actress or a chef. Being hard, even cruel and sarcastic, was almost required. She assured them both that she still felt quite confident and that she wasn’t thin-skinned. She didn’t want to mention Blake’s confidence about finding the hired killer and tying him to Heckett. That was her ace in the hole—the closer in a deal, as her father might say—but it was better not to rely on it or let the DA think she was not working hard herself.
She sat back and closed her eyes. Now that she was home and away from the case, even for a little while, she could think about other things. She realized that since her lunch with Lieutenant Blake, she had been feeling different, and it had nothing to do with the case. She was feeling different in the sense that she was thinking about things she hadn’t thought about for a while, namely, sex and romance.
Her mother wasn’t all wrong about her fixation on her career. During her time in the Orange County DA’s office, she’d had two relationships, both lasting just short of a year. One was with a young doctor, Abe Curtis, who had just joined a family practice in Middletown. They met at a charity function. Her mother was ecstatic when she heard Michele was going on a second date with him, practically planning the wedding. But between her work schedule and his, they began to drift apart, and his ultimate complaint about her was basically the same one she received from her next great fling, Ray Mallen, the owner of a large heating-oil company he had inherited from his father-in-law. “You’re always somewhere else, Michele. Often, I’m afraid, when we’re making love,” he told her. “Not good for my ego.”
She couldn’t deny it, but worse, she couldn’t prevent it. Even if she forced herself to stop thinking about her current prosecution when she went on a date, she always slipped back into it, either because something said reminded her of something she had read or heard related to her case or some vision of the defendant flashed across her mind and roused her anger and passion.
It was Abe who had told her on the day they broke up that he wasn’t sure if her dedication and ambition were a curse or a blessing. “I’ve always been ambitious and determined, but I knew from the day I decided to go into medicine that if I didn’t learn how to compartmentalize, I wouldn’t have a personal life. You need to get there, Michele, if not with me, then with someone else, or you’ll just burn out.”
Were they both right? Was there something wrong with her? She remembered the discussion of Moby-Dick in her college American lit class. When they discussed the character of Captain Ahab, who lived primarily to get revenge on the white whale, he was described as monomaniacal because of his obsession with that and that only. It was technically a form of psychosis. Was that happening to her?
Maybe to disprove that, she thought romantically about Blake now, not that she could prevent it. He had incredible eyes and such a confident demeanor. It was easy to feel safe with him, and despite her need to be independent and strong, as independent and strong as any man in her position, she couldn’t deny a desire to be with someone like him, someone who would be there to protect her.
Did that make her weaker? Couldn’t you still be dependent on someone else for something in your life? If people were so independent of each other, to the point where they didn’t need each other, what was a relationship, a partnership created just so two people would have more buying power or something?
On the other hand, she was guilty of making sure the men she was with knew she could be independent. Maybe she was too strident about that. There were silly little things she didn’t let Abe or Ray do for her, like step forward to open a door or pull out her chair at the table for her. Both had odd looks on their faces when she moved quickly to do these things for herself. Abe went so far as to say, “Are you trying to make me obsolete?” In the beginning, they could laugh about it, but as they saw each other more and more, those little things began to take their toll, to chip away until they were almost escorting each other to everything like two acquaintances and not two people in a passionate romance.
“Serves me right for wanting to play baseball rather than play with dolls,” she muttered now.
She opened her briefcase and took out the folder Eleanor had given her with information about her opposing counsel, this John Milton. When she read the description of his early life and looking at all he’d had to overcome, she was amazed that he had reached the level of success he had.
Apparently, his biological mother was a prostitute in New Orleans who had either died or disappeared immediately after his birth. He was an orphan until he was nearly eight and then was adopted by a Cajun family in Houma, Louisiana. He graduated from Tulane University and practiced law in New Orleans at two criminal defense firms before passing the bar in New York and working at a small firm in Albany.
She noted that his adoptive parents were both deceased and the law firm he had worked at in Albany was gone. It had only one other attorney, however, and after Milton left, that attorney, Robert Lial, had suffered a stroke and retired. By then, Milton had racked up an impressive record of defenses. When she perused them, she concluded that it was no wonder Simon and James had hired him to replace Warner Murphy.
She read some of the news stories about the cases Milton had taken on. Some of the clients were accused of the most heinous crimes. Like the grandmother accused of deliberately suffocating her own grandson. Her daughter and son-in-law had turned her in to the police, but Milton won an acquittal despite their testimony. In fact, reasonable doubt was built around the possibility that the daughter was the murderer. From what Michele read, Milton seemed to be quite good at confusing the testimony of prosecution witnesses and carving a clear path to reasonable doubt in all his victories. None of the cases he had taken was an easy defense. If anything, he seemed to search for the most difficult.
There was a head shot of him at the end of the file. He looked too young for the career he had already had. He was strikingly handsome. He had eyes that even in a photograph seemed to be alive and following her. It was surely her imagination, but she thought his lips moved ever so slightly, lips that were enticing, suggestive.
I’m working too hard, she thought, and quickly closed the file just as she felt her aunt’s presence. She was standing there, looking at her with an unusually serious expression on her face.
“What’s wrong, Aunt Eve?” Michele asked.
“I saw a dark shadow hovering over you just now,” she said. “You’re troubled. Is it this new case you’re trying in court?”
Michele sat up quickly, fighting the urge to look around. Her aunt could spook her sometimes, and Michele could certainly spook herself. Lately, she was always looking behind her, and it wasn’t simply because she was living in a big city now. She had been doing that back home, too, especially when she took on a prosecution. Maybe she should see a therapist. She wasn’t just being careful anymore. She was growing paranoid.
“It’s turning out to be a little more complicated than I anticipated, yes, but I’m fine. I’ll handle it.”
“Or it will handle you,” Eve said. “Have you met the defendant yet?”
“No, I won’t until the trial, and I might not say a word to him, unless he decides to take the stand. I’ll be talking plenty about him. Don’t worry about that.”
Her aunt nodded. “Sometimes people affect you with their negativity. Stay out of his aura.”
Michele laughed. “I won’t get that close. Don’t worry.”
Eve narrowed her eyes. Whenever she did that, Michele couldn’t help feeling her aunt really was special in some way. She wasn’t a total kook. “There’s a lot of interest in this case,” Aunt Eve said, looking as if she was reading a crystal ball.
“Yes, it’s a high-profile victim, very wealthy and successful. The defendant is part of that world, too. There’s going to be a lot of coverage in the media.”
“No, there’s something more,” she said. “Something bigger.”
Michele smiled. “Like what, Aunt Eve?”
“I’m not sure, but I feel it. I feel deeper vibrations. Be careful, Michele. Trust no one.”
“Right. Now you sound just like your sister.”
She snapped out of her trance instantly. “Well, I’ll have to make sure that doesn’t happen too often,” she said, and they both laughed.
“Let me take you out to dinner,” Michele said, feeling new energy. “We’ll go to your favorite gypsy restaurant in the East Village.”
“And I predict we’ll both be very satisfied,” Aunt Eve said.
Michele watched her leave, buried the file on John Milton in her briefcase, closed it, and rose to shower and dress. As she took off her clothes, she found herself visualizing Lieutenant Blake again, fantasizing about him, imagining his fingers undoing her blouse, unzipping her skirt, and his lips brushing across her forehead, down her nose to her lips. She actually moaned thinking about it and then was abruptly ripped out of her erotic thoughts by the landline ringing. For a moment, she just stared at it angrily, and then, thinking it was her mother for sure, she lifted the receiver roughly, nearly pulling it apart.
“Hello,” she said. “I’m fine,” she was about to add the moment she heard her mother’s voice, but the words got stuck in her throat.
It was Lieutenant Matthew Blake. “We’re going to have to make a deal with this man,” he said.
“Excuse me? What man? Surely not the defendant?”
“No, the hired killer. He’ll turn on Heckett to get a lesser sentence once I corner him.”
“Why do I have to make that decision now?”
“I’m close,” he said. “I want to get this all neatly packaged for you.”
The way he said “for you” actually made her blush. Despite enjoying that feeling, she reacted the same way she did whenever anyone professionally involved with her made a pass at her. Her instinct was to consider it insulting, taking a liberty, thinking that somehow flattery or flirting was important to her because she was a woman.
“Of course,” she said pedantically, “Heckett is still the target. He paid for the murder. He initiated it. And in my eyes, and I hope the eyes of any juror, he is really the one who pulled the trigger.”
“The irony here,” Blake said, “is that the trigger man has committed more sins. We’ll have to talk about all that one of these days.”
Was he suggesting a future for them beyond the Strumfield case?
She hit him with one of her favorite Professor Baker quotes. Baker was one of her law-school teachers. He had a sharp wit and a great sense of irony. He was actually a little impish and loved irritating his students by playing devil’s advocate.
“Morality is a luxury the law often can’t afford,” Michele said.
Lieutenant Blake didn’t laugh. Somehow she had known he wouldn’t. “He’s always counted on that,” he said.
“Who?”
“Satan,” he said.
She waited to hear him laugh, but he didn’t. He didn’t sound as if he was kidding at all. “Never met him,” she said.
“Yes, you have. Many times. We all have. I’ll be in touch very soon. Hopefully with some good news for you,” he added, and hung up before she could respond.
Nevertheless, she held the receiver against her ear for a few moments, as if she could hear him talking after he had ended the call. She caught the image of herself in the gilded oval mirror her aunt had put up on the wall. She was standing there naked, holding the phone, and call it her wild imagination or call it suggestive thinking, but she would swear that just for a moment or two, there was a dark shadow hovering over her, just as her aunt had described.
It lingered and then moved on to become one with a shadow in the corner, a corner she would avoid.
8
“How do you know that creep?” Fish asked Blake as they left the fifth-floor walk-up in the South Bronx. “I feel like we just took a dip in a sewer.”
He inhaled deeply to clear his lungs of the stench and what he was certain were dozens of airborne infections. He couldn’t help but imagine the nests and larvae of every known insect inside those walls. The building was rotting from the inside out.
“That’s where they live, the sewer,” Blake muttered.
“He looks like somethin’ wiped off the bottom of a shoe.”
The informant was anemic-looking, with cloudy, dull brown eyes and thinning, nearly orange hair. A piece of his right earlobe was missing, and he had a rather ugly sore at the right corner of his thin, pale lips. He coughed a lot, too, and spat into a ragged, faded green towel. Fish didn’t want to touch anything in the rat’s nest, least of all the informant. Blake seemed unaffected, practically oblivious. His tone of voice when he questioned the man was gentle, concerned, the voice of a clergyman, not a hard-ass policeman.
“I thought you spoke to him pretty kindly.”
“He’s to be pitied, yes,” Blake said. “You drive.”
Fish got behind the wheel. “I’m curious,” he said before he started the engine. “Really? How do you find somethin’ like that? I hesitate to call him somebody.”
“A friend of mine, a priest, Father McGukian, recommended him.”
“Recommended him?
That sounds like he was helping him get a job.”
“In a sense, he was. He thought I might help him on the path to salvation.”
Fish smiled and started the engine. “I get it,” he said, pulling away from the curb. “By being an informant, he thinks he’s compensating for a life of sin. Balancing the old scales of justice.”
“Something like that.”
“This priest persuaded him to cooperate?”
“That and an occasional fifty and those groceries we brought,” Blake said.
“Well, if he confessed his sins to this Father McGukian, the priest isn’t supposed to share that information, right?”
“He didn’t share details. He just pointed me in the right direction. A good priest is not much different from a good lawyer. They know how to split infinitives.”
“Whatever. I’ve worked with some informants. They’re usually trying to squeeze out of somethin’. I never saw one this down and out. And I never brought one a bag of groceries.”
“Kindness and charity can unlock many a shut door. You can get more with honey than vinegar, Fish.”
“I’m not going to find out that you went to seminary school first, am I?”
“You’re a detective,” Blake said. “Figure it out.”
Fish laughed. “Have you heard of this other guy, the guy he fingered? Skip Tyler?”
“His name’s come up, but I haven’t had the pleasure of an introduction.”
“Right. The pleasure. This job is full of perks. Whatever you believe, Lieutenant. I sometimes wonder how anyone could like this job.”
“You think of whom you’re protecting or whom you’re giving the justice they deserve.”
“Sometimes it feels more like pest control. Doesn’t it get to you?”
“What?”
“The slime, the underbelly, what my grandmother called ‘the rust of the human soul’?”
Judgement Day Page 8