"Do you have a drink?" she said. "I could use a drink."
"I might have a beer."
"That would be great," she said. "I'll get it."
"Isn't it a little late?" but she was already out of the living room into the kitchen. I could hear her opening my refrigerator, imagine her peering into it as if the mysteries of the universe were growing there, which they might have been for how often I cleaned it.
"How old is this milk?" she asked from the kitchen.
"I don't know, pretty old, I'd guess."
"Old enough so that the ice from the refrigeration cables has grown around it, locking it in place," she said. "What's gefilte fish?"
"It's medicinal," I said.
"Do you want something?"
"No. I'm fine," I said.
She came back into the living room, twisting off the top of a Rolling Rock. She sat down on the couch beside me with her legs curled beneath her and took a long drink.
"Thank you," she said. "I didn't know where to go when I saw that bird just lying there with its head like that." She shuddered. "On my doorstep. I had to get away."
"What are you going to do?"
"Get someone to clean it up."
"Not me," I said. "I'm out of the dead animal disposal business."
"Maybe I'll call Henry on the car phone tomorrow. He'll do it. He takes care of me when he can."
"He took care of me, too."
"I'm so sorry about your eye."
She sort of shuffled on her knees toward me and touched the eye gently with her fingertips and then harder, hard enough to make me wince and pull away. "Does it hurt much?" she asked.
"Only when you press it."
She stroked around my eye lightly with the back of her hand, soothing the nerves, and then pressed it hard again.
"Like that," I said. "Stop it."
"When Henry came back for us with the limousine we knew you had vomited. Henry had tried to clean it up, and all the windows were open, but it still smelled like hell. The councilman was livid for a moment and then he laughed and laughed. He told Chester, 'Not only does your lawyer cry, but he drinks like a teenybopper.' Jimmy and Chuckie thought that was funny as hell. Chester told them both to shut up."
"It wasn't the drinking," I said. "It was the sock in my eye."
"Now you're being defensive."
"I'm a good drinker."
"Of course you are," she said sweetly.
"I could drink both those bastards under the table."
"Of course you could."
"You don't think so?"
"No," she said. "What are we going to do about my landlord?"
"Get your friend Norvel to threaten him."
"He's not a friend anymore."
She was leaning over me now, still looking at my eye, searching the black and blue as if she were searching tea leaves for hidden meanings. With her makeup off, in her sweatshirt and jeans, there was something innocently collegiate about her.
"Tell me, Veronica," I asked. "What are you doing with these guys, Jimmy Moore and Norvel Goodwin?"
"It's a long story. Very sad."
"Tell me."
"It started with a boy, a very sweet boy. He's dead now but that's how it started." I thought I saw something in her eye, but I must have imagined it because as I kept looking at her it disappeared. "I'll tell you sometime," she said. "Just not now, please. What am I going to do tonight?"
"I'll call you a cab."
"I can't go home with that dead bird on my doorstep. I just can't."
With a gallant shrug I stood up. "All right," I said. "I'll take you home and clean up the bird. But this is the last time."
"Can't I stay here?" she asked.
"No. And tomorrow I'll file for a restraining order. Restraining orders are generally useless, but at least it will be something. I'll let you know when the court sets up the hearing."
"Can't I stay the night on your sofa?"
"No," I said. "Definitely not."
I walked to the closet and was reaching for my raincoat when she came from behind and placed her arms around me. Her hands lightly rubbed up and down my chest. "Can't I stay, please? I wouldn't sleep knowing that bird was there, and even if you threw it down the chute I'd still see it lying there, its sad little neck bent like it is, a small dribble of blood out its beak."
Without turning around, with her hands still floating across my chest, I said, "I really can't."
"It's Norvel, isn't it?"
"It's everything."
"I won't let him hurt you."
I pulled her arms away and turned around. "I can't," I said, but it came out more like "Ay kaaugh" because she had slipped her tongue into my mouth. I tasted the sexy beeriness of her breath and smelled the wetness of her hair and there was something silky and warm about the way she pressed her body into mine and though I said, "Ay ayeaally kaaugh," I knew that I would.
Jeanne, my first lover, a funny word to use for a sixteen-year-old girl with braces, was an athlete, a distance swimmer, all shoulders and thighs, trained for long, exhausting efforts that left her shaking with weariness. I was a notable disappointment to her and we both ended up more bemused than satisfied. My experiences with Michelle were more satisfactory, she had patience and clever hands and a willingness to experiment that was just right for a beginner. Sandra was tall and cold and endured sex but I was fascinated by her blondness, white white hair, pale skin, a profound phlegmaticness. Rebecca was a virgin, but eager, and let me play the role of experienced older man, though she was only a year behind me in college. "Let's try this," I would say, nervously, and she'd always reply with a cheerful, "Sure." Allyn was in love with me, which brought to the table an intensity I found uncomfortable. Sue was blonde and plump and from Wisconsin but still sweetly kinked, with a thing about her feet. And of course my ex-fiancee Julie, the one true love of my youth, earnest and sad, loosing tears when we orgasmed together with silent sighs under her down comforter. Along the way there were Tina and Bonnie and Lauren, who laughed and grabbed and shouted in French. There was a dancer, a cop, a divorced woman from Toledo with a son older than me. There were many many delightful women, every shape, every size, every political party including the Communists, and I screwed them all. Maybe I was no Wilt Chamberlain, but I was no wilting violet either and I had made love to a peck of women in my life. But I had never made love to a woman like Veronica Ashland.
When we were naked, on my unmade bed, rubbing our hands uncontrollably over each other's bodies, she opened the foil packet she found in my drawer, the packet I had stolen from Bissonette's love chest, and popped the condom in her mouth, placing it upon me with her teeth, leaving just the right amount of slack at the tip. Then, like a crazed leopard, she was on top of me, pressing the palm of her hand into my swollen eye, biting my neck, my breast, licking my chest and my ear, pressing my eye and biting so hard I screamed as she worked. She had a thin supple body that responded to everything like a dream, her breasts were small and sharp and prickly hot, entering her was like entering a jar of electric honey, that sweet, that wild. She bent forward and arched back and bent forward like a willow stick, grabbing my hair painfully hard along the way as she sucked a kiss from my throat. She came quickly and ferociously and best of all she came again, and again. I knew it was her, not me, and I struggled to keep up but she was always one moment ahead of me. I moaned my orgasm and she howled, snatching at the air like a lioness and then the willow bent back toward me and she buried her face in my neck and meowed. She sounded like a satisfied house cat, stretched around a newly emptied bowl of milk.
The sound involuntarily brought up a question. "There was a litter box in your apartment."
"Yes," she said.
"But no cat," I said. "That was your cat the Greek killed, wasn't it?"
"Yes, it was."
"But you acted like you didn't care about the cat, just the mess."
"It was only a cat," she said with a dismissive laugh.
; "But I know about women and their cats, they are like babies to them, their children. A cat gets a hairball, they grow frantic. But you let me drop the corpse of your cat into a Strawbridge bag and dump it down the chute without a tear."
"How should I have acted?"
"Mournful, distraught, pathetically tearful. Other women would have."
"I'm not like other women."
"No, you're not," I said. "You are the coldest bitch I ever met," and, like an incantation handed down father to son from the deepest mists of prehistory, the words made me hard again immediately. I twisted my hips with a violent rush, sending her sprawling on the bed, and I pressed myself into her and held her arms over her head and bit her throat like she had bitten mine and sucked her nipples when she told me to and bit her even after she told me to stop and I made her cry like no cat had ever made her cry and she came rivers.
It was the best sex I had ever had, better than I had ever hoped to have, and no matter the threat and whatever the price, I wanted more.
Part III
Witnesses for the Prostitution
21
PRESCOTT STOOD BEFORE the potential jurors, clipboard in hand, asking questions in his commanding way. There were forty of them, sitting in the courtroom's benches like churchgoers in their pews. It was from this group, summoned from the jury room by Judge Gimbel's clerk, that the twelve jurors and two alternates for United States v. Moore and Concannon would be chosen. Prescott had petitioned the court to be allowed to question the jurors himself and Judge Gimbel had grudgingly granted the petition. If you had asked him, Prescott would have told you he was examining these potential jurors in an effort to pick a fair and unbiased jury. What he was really doing, in addition to sneaking in pretrial arguments, was trying to find jurors who would be the most unfair and most biased in favor of Jimmy Moore and Chester Concannon. That's the way a trial works: the lawyers on the two sides pack the jury with prejudices favorable to their clients with the expectation that these attempts at manipulation will balance themselves out. It is why more than a few juries break down in nervous collapse.
I was at one end of the defense table next to Chester Concannon, who sat with his back straight and hands crossed before him. Jimmy sat at the other end. Immediately behind us were three bright-eyed handsome lawyers all in a row, the Talbott, Kittredge and Chase trial team assisting Prescott. Madeline had been left at the office to do research. The Talbott, Kittredge crowd was furiously scribbling notes and conferring in whispers with a tall, bearded man with a brutal case of dandruff who, I was told, was their jury expert, a man named Bruce Pierpont. Despite repeated promises from Prescott and numerous requests, I still hadn't seen Pierpont's report. Every now and then one of the Talbott, Kittredge lawyers would lean over and whisper something to Moore and he would nod, a look of supreme probity on his face. I wondered how long Prescott had worked with him to get the expression just right. The Talbott, Kittredge lawyers never leaned over to whisper something to me. Except for our proximity in the courtroom, it was impossible to tell we were on the same side. That had been Prescott's idea. "It shouldn't seem like we're ganging up on Eggert," he had said, and so Chester and I kept our distance.
Closer to the jury box was the prosecution table where Eggert and a beefy older man, with heavy hands and a neck like an ox, sat representing the government. The ox wore a blue blazer and his hair was swept rigidly into place, the very image of a man who liked his steak still bleeding. He was the FBI agent on the case, Special Agent Stemkowski. Once, in the middle of the proceedings, he cracked his knuckles and the rat-a-tat sounded like gunshots.
Judge Gimbel sat up high on the bench, bowing his hairless head as he worked on documents obviously unrelated to this trial. He was a busy man, Judge Gimbel, and you couldn't expect him to concentrate on something as routine as Prescott's jury voir dire.
"Now, as you may know," said Prescott to the entire group of potential jurors, "one of the defendants in this case is a public official, a city councilman. The other defendant is the councilman's aide. Do any of you believe that public officials, like the city councilman here, are usually corrupt?"
No response.
"Now, ladies and gentlemen, I need you to be honest. Don't any of you look at a public official like my client, a city councilman on the government payroll, and say to yourselves, he is dirty somehow?"
Still no response. He smiled kindly, looked down at his clipboard, ran his finger across a list of names of the jury venire, and looked up again. "Mrs. Emily Simpson."
An older woman raised her hand, thin frame, pale powdered skin, bouffant hair, glasses that looked like they were squinting.
"Mrs. Simpson, do you work?"
"Yes. I work the register at a discount store."
"And you pay your taxes then, of course."
"Of course." Mrs. Simpson's hands grasped the pocketbook on her lap.
"Do you think the money you send over in taxes is well spent?"
"On the whole? No," she said, looking around at the others seated nearby for encouragement.
"Why not?"
"The politicians don't listen to us, they listen to the rich folk, the people who have the money to help them."
"So what you're saying, Mrs. Simpson, is that most politicians can be bought."
"I guess I am."
"Anyone else? How many believe that politicians as a whole are generally unscrupulous and easily bought and paid for?"
Mrs. Simpson hesitantly raised her hand and looked around for support. The woman seated next to her, with thick features and a dignified cant to her head, smiled at Mrs. Simpson and raised her hand, and then a man in the front row, crew cut, thick neck, and then another hand, and soon the great majority of potential jurors had their hands raised.
I glanced at Eggert. He was nodding his head, as if Prescott was proving his case for him.
"And why is that?" Prescott looked back at his clipboard. "Mrs. Lanford?"
The dignified woman next to Mrs. Simpson said, "Yes, that's me."
"Why do you think politicians are so easily bought?" asked Prescott.
"Because they's greedy."
"And where do you think the money goes, Mrs. Lanford, this money that buys them?"
"In they's pockets," said Mrs. Lanford. "Right in they's own wallets."
"Those of you who said that politicians are often bought, is that what all of you think?"
"No," said a man in the back, his gray hair neat, wearing a polo shirt on his day off from the office.
Prescott scanned the names on his clipboard. "Mr. Roberts, is it? Where do you think it goes?"
"To their campaigns," he said. "They're always campaigning. It seems every other year there's a new election."
"Do you think it's the politicians' fault that they need to ask for money?" asked Prescott.
"I guess not," said Roberts. "I mean, we end up voting for the guy with the most television ads, so I guess it's our fault as much as anyone's."
"Does anyone here believe that politicians should not be allowed to ask for campaign contributions?"
No hands were raised.
"I'm going to hold you all to that now. What you all are telling me is that you each believe it is proper for politicians to ask for campaign contributions, that such requests are precisely what the system demands of politicians like my client."
Before anyone could reply Eggert stood and in his reedy voice said, "Objection, Your Honor. Mr. Prescott's voir dire has again devolved into a lecture."
"Civics 101," said Judge Gimbel. "We don't need citizenship classes, Mr. Prescott. Just get on with it."
"I'm almost through, Your Honor," said Prescott.
"We're grateful," said the judge.
"Now, how many of you have your own businesses?"
A small number of the jurors raised their hands. Prescott referred again to his clipboard. "Mr. Thompkins, what kind of business do you own?"
"A printing shop," said a thin balding black man with ext
remely long fingers.
"Who's running it now?"
"My employees. I have an assistant manager."
"Now, Mr. Thompkins, if while you're away your assistant manager should do something wrong, would you be responsible?"
"If he messed up a job, sure I would. I stand by all the work coming out of my shop."
"Suppose he did something illegal while you were away. Suppose, without your knowing it, he started printing up counterfeit money. Would you still be responsible?"
"No way."
"Does anyone believe Mr. Thompkins should be criminally responsible if his assistant manager started printing up counterfeit money in his print shop?"
Prescott scanned the jurors and nodded approvingly when he saw no hands raised. "I don't think so either," said Prescott. "You're off the hook, Mr. Thompkins. Thank you very much for your time, I'm sure you all will be terrific jurors." Prescott sat down at the defense table and formed a huddle with Moore and his trial team and the bearded, snowy jury expert.
Judge Gimbel put down his pen and looked directly at me. "Mr. Carl," he said. "Do you have any voir dire?"
"Can I have a moment, Judge?" I asked.
With the jury venire still sitting in the courtroom I calmly broke into the Talbott, Kittredge huddle. "Mr. Prescott," I said. "May I speak to you, please?"
He pressed his lips together and said, "Let's go outside for a moment, shall we."
I followed him out of the courtroom, passing the rows of potential jurors, the press, the court buffs, old men who hang around the courthouse whiling away their retirements with free entertainment. Once outside in the long cream hallway, Prescott lifted his chin and peered down at me, looking very straight and very stern.
"That last bit, Mr. Prescott, sir," I said. "The questions about the counterfeiter? I have to admit they caused me some concern."
"They did?" he said, his voice rising in confusion.
"Yes, sir. It appeared as if you may have been indicating, maybe, that a subordinate, not a principal, is the responsible party here."
Prescott looked down at me, his eyes wide with an injured innocence. "It was just voir dire, Victor."
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