Mean Streak

by Carolyn Wheat

  “Cass, please, haven’t you ever presented evidence that you weren’t one hundred percent convinced of yourself? Do you always act as judge and jury?”

  I opened my mouth to retort that I would never have permitted a client to slip bogus documents past me, but then I remembered Bobo.

  Bobo wasn’t my client. My client was Jaime Ortega, late of Puerto Rico. He swore on a stack of Bibles that the car he was accused of stealing was sold to him by a guy on the street named Bobo. I explained to him that he was going to be convicted of possession of stolen property unless he produced a bill of sale proving that he’d bought the car in good faith. I was confident that he had no such bill of sale, and would be taking the eminently reasonable plea offer extended by the assistant district attorney.

  Instead, on the next court date Jaime proudly presented me with a bill of sale. In the space marked “Seller’s name” was scrawled the single word: “Bobo.” No last name, no address. Just “Bobo.”

  The anxious lines around Riordan’s mouth disappeared as I told the story, and his booming laugh filled the room. “So what did you do?” he teased. “Throw the bill of sale back into the guy’s face and call him a liar?”

  “He might not have been the liar,” I said defensively. “Maybe some guy on the street really gave him a bill of sale in the name of ‘Bobo.’”

  “At least that’s what you told the judge,” Matt surmised.

  “There were two possibilities,” I explained. “Either my client was a very stupid man who was taken advantage of by an unscrupulous seller, or he—”

  “Or he was a very stupid man who stole a car and didn’t have the brains to fill out a bogus bill of sale with a believable seller’s name,” Riordan finished. “I take it you didn’t see fit to present the judge with that alternative.”

  “I told the judge my client was a cane-cutting peasant from Puerto Rico who got ripped off by a city slicker named Bobo,” I admitted.

  “What happened to the case?”

  “God, I don’t remember. This happened years ago.”

  “But you tried to get your guy a better deal on the basis of a bill of sale you had some reason to believe he might have forged. That might be penny ante stuff compared to Nunzie’s trip to Barbados, but the principle is the same. Does a good defense attorney look a gift horse in the mouth?”

  “He does if the horse might turn around and bite him.”

  He considered that remark in silence; this horse had bitten Matt with a vengeance. But I did erase one of the two check marks I’d placed in my mental Hell, no column.

  “And then?” I prompted, bringing him back to the matter at hand.

  “And then Lazarus, the snake, put the squeeze on Nunzie,” he said. “He promised him a walk if he’d incriminate me in the phony alibi. Word on the street is that Nunzie bought the deal and told Lazarus that he was given the documents by my investigator.”

  “This is Fat Jack Vance, the bail bondsman?” He was a legend in Manhattan court circles; the fat man and Riordan went back a long way together.

  Matt nodded. “The next word I hear is that Lazarus sent Nunzie into the grand jury to get an indictment for subornation of perjury against Jack and me.”

  “And right after that, Nunzie Aiello went missing,” I finished. Nunzie’s disappearance right after his grand jury appearance had been the subject of a certain amount of press speculation. Half the reporters in town thought he’d taken a strategic trip to the Old Country, while the other half had him swimming in the East River in cement shoes. Either way, his absence was Riordan’s reprieve. There could be no trial without the chief witness.

  “Lazarus was steamed, I take it.”

  “Lazarus was rabid,” Riordan amended. “Now there was even wild talk he was going to prove I killed Nunzie to prevent him from testifying against me.”

  I finished the story for him. “And then, last October, the Department of Sanitation towed a derelict car from under the Williamsburg Bridge. The car was in the pound for a month. It was about to be auctioned, when the guys inspecting it smelled something rotten. They opened the trunk, and there was Nunzie. One bullet to the head, another in the mouth.”

  “Classic,” was all Matt said. “The bullet in the mouth is a traditional way of marking an informer.”

  “Do you think Cretella did it?” I asked. This was, strictly speaking, irrelevant to Matt’s defense. But I had decided that if the answer was yes, Matt would have to keep looking for counsel. I could represent Matt himself without becoming known as a Mafia lawyer, but if there were deeper Mob crimes underlying Matt’s troubles, I preferred to stay on the Brooklyn side of the bridge.

  Matt’s eyes narrowed; at first, I thought he resented the question. But his thoughtful tone told me that he was thinking the matter through. “If Nunzie was shtupping me,” he said in an uncharacteristically tentative tone, “then he was probably sticking it to Frankie too. I’ve represented Frank Cretella for almost fifteen years now, and this isn’t the first of his former associates to be found with a bullet in his mouth.”

  “You didn’t know beforehand, but you’d have defended Cretella if he were charged with the murder.” I tried to say the words dispassionately, but a hint of disapproval must have been there, because Matt suddenly exploded. He banged his open hand on the table with a force that had the glasses jumping and the waiter running over with a look of alarm on his face.

  “Goddamn right I’d have defended him,” Matt said. “And that’s what Lazarus wanted to prevent. That’s why he wants me indicted and convicted. Because as long as I’ve been Frankie Cretella’s lawyer, he hasn’t been able to convict the man of anything. But with me defending myself, Cretella has to get new counsel, and Lazarus finally has a chance to get the conviction he needs for his political career.”

  I gave the agitated waiter a conciliatory smile and waved him away. “I’d say you had a pretty good opinion of your own legal talents,” I remarked to my companion. “Of course,” I amended with an air of judicious consideration, “in this case, your assessment is pretty close to the truth. You have kept Cretella out of jail for a long time. But is that necessarily a good thing for the rest of society?”

  “My job is to defend my client,” Matt replied. “Society has another lawyer.”

  “But Cretella is a—” I broke off as my mind ran through the various terms that could be used to designate a man reputed to be the new head of the Scaniello crime family.

  “That’s exactly my point,” Matt said. He settled back in his chair like a man victorious in argument. “Because of Frankie’s reputation, you and everyone else in this city are willing to believe he clipped Nunzie. But we do not convict people of murder in this country solely on the basis of reputation.”

  It came to me that reputation was at the heart of the case against Matt. He was the aging gunslinger all the up-and-coming shootists wanted to best. He was the bull moose whose magnificent antlers the hunters wanted gracing their walls. Convicting him would make Nick Lazarus a famous man, a man who might rise politically the same way Tom Dewey and Rudy Giuliani had risen.

  I’d been spooning tiramisu into my mouth as I listened to Riordan tell the story. Now I put the tiny silver spoon down with a clatter as I realized what else I was doing: writing my summation in the case of United States of America v. Matthew Daniel Riordan.

  My mental checklist was forgotten; I no longer remembered how many check marks were in each of my columns. It no longer mattered.

  I had taken the case.

  To a Brooklyn lawyer, a trip to lower Manhattan was like a shopping spree on upper Fifth Avenue. The courthouses were more imposing; the people on the crowded streets were more important and better dressed. And the prices were higher.

  I passed the Municipal Building—a huge wedding cake on the outside, a rat’s maze on the inside—and kept going along Centre Street. If I kept moving, I’d come to 100 Centre, the huge monolith that housed the supreme court and criminal courts, as well as the infa
mous Tombs prison. If I stopped a little short of that, I’d be at 60 Centre, the picturesque old civil courthouse they always show on television when they want to display New York jurisprudence.

  But today I was headed for the big time, for the federal courthouse that was home to the Southern District of New York, the gold-topped building that sat in Foley Square like a duchess. There were police barricades on the sidewalk in front of the long stone staircase that led up to the door; reporters with minicams milled around, smoking and waiting. Waiting for what? I wondered; I had a quick frisson of anticipation as I realized they might recognize me as Riordan’s lawyer and pepper me with questions I wasn’t ready to answer. But then I laughed at myself; they weren’t here for me or Riordan—yet. They were here because Riordan’s former client, Frankie Cretella, was on trial in a RICO case. The reporters were waiting for Cretella’s new lawyer—who just happened to be Riordan’s former associate, Kurt Hallengren. Kurt was riding the case for all it was worth; he was well on his way to supplanting his old boss as the preeminent criminal lawyer in New York.

  Come next week, when I showed up for Riordan’s arraignment, the reporters would beg me for a sound bite; today, they didn’t know me from Eve, and that was fine with me. I wrapped myself in anonymity and strode up the stone steps, then pushed open the heavy door that led to the lobby.

  The ceilings were higher than St. Patrick’s Cathedral, and decorated almost as elaborately. Gold-edged bas-relief flowers painted in blue and rust-red, long-stemmed chandeliers, and windows which let the light through in shafts that illuminated the building like well-placed track lights. I looked up and stifled the quick feeling of awe, the sense of being dwarfed by a place of quiet power. What I was feeling was exactly what the architect of this building wanted me to feel, which was reason enough to resist the emotion.

  I pulled out my lawyer’s identification and showed it to the uniformed guard, then bypassed the metal detectors and made my way to the elevator banks. There were two sets, one to the tenth floor and the other from ten to twenty. I pushed the button for the second bank and waited.

  In Brooklyn, they say it is better to know the judge than to know the law. Here in federal court, I knew neither the judge nor the law; I’d come to get a sneak preview of what I’d be up against the next time I walked through the gilded doors.

  My old friend Lani Rasmussen, who’d transferred from Brooklyn Legal Aid to Federal Defender Services, sat behind her desk, stockinged feet propped up on a half-open file drawer, loafers on the floor next to three huge piles of file folders. She wore a drip-dry khaki blazer and a shapeless navy skirt with an Oxford-cloth shirt. A female version of the standard Legal Aid uniform. Clothes for the woman who hates clothes.

  “I guess you want some idea of what you’re up against,” she said by way of greeting. She stood up and slipped her shoes on.

  “I also want lunch,” I said, nodding assent. “Where shall we eat?”

  “I know just the place,” she said with a grin. “You’ll love it. You can have any kind of food you want, and the atmosphere can’t be beat.”

  I couldn’t believe it when my old pal marched me down the stone steps to the row of food booths that were set up every summer in the plaza between the courthouse and the Municipal Building.

  True, you could get any kind of food you wanted, from Greek salads to Chinese lo mein to Ferrara’s tart lemon ices. But you had to sit at metal picnic tables that were chained to the ground so that enterprising New York thieves didn’t haul them away in pickup trucks during the night. And the food was just short of fast-food bland, for all the pretense to ethnic diversity. Why were we eating here when the neighborhood held such a wealth of really good restaurants?

  “I have a client coming by in a half hour,” Lani explained. “She has to sign an affidavit for me on a motion to suppress. I think I’ll go for a black bean burrito,” she went on, making her way to the line of customers waiting at the booth marked “The Whole Enchilada.”

  A black bean burrito sounded good; I stepped into line with her. “Anything you can tell me about Lazarus’ case against Riordan,” I began, “even the most off-the-wall courthouse gossip, could help. What have you heard?”

  “I know what everybody knows,” Lani replied. “That the minute Eddie Fitz said he could bring down Matt Riordan, Nick Lazarus had him transferred out of Brooklyn and assigned full-time to the Court Corruption Task Force.”

  “Eddie Fitz,” I echoed, thinking aloud. “This is Detective Fitzgerald, I take it.” My friend nodded. “He’s the one who testified before the Mollen Commission? The one who started all this bullshit about corruption in the courts? I don’t remember running into him in the courthouses in Brooklyn. What precinct did he work out of?”

  “I don’t know,” Lani replied. “Someplace black. Brownsville or Bed-Stuy. The kind of neighborhood that just loves young Irish cops from Long Island coming in like centurions occupying Gaul.”

  “I should be able to get the skinny on him,” I said. We were at the head of the line; we placed our orders and watched the man behind the counter wrap black beans and pork in a huge flour tortilla. “My contacts in Brooklyn are second to none. What I need from you is Manhattan dirt.”

  “If it’s dirt you want,” Lani said, making her way through the crowd, paper plate in one hand, giant soda in the other, “you need to concentrate on Fat Jack Vance.”

  She led me to a table in the shade. I slid onto the metal bench and set my plate down. For a moment I wondered whether it was prudent to have our conversation in such a public place, then realized there were very few people who looked like lawyers eating here.

  “Riordan’s co-defendant?” I asked; a dumb question. How many Fat Jack Vances were there in Manhattan, anyway?

  Lani nodded. “His crimee, as we used to say in Brooklyn.”

  I smiled the obligatory answering smile, but I didn’t like the implication. Crimee meant that two defendants had committed a crime together, and I wasn’t about to begin Riordan’s defense by believing he was guilty.

  “What about Fat Jack?” I asked. I unwrapped the burrito and lifted it to my mouth. It was hot and squishy and tasted dark and satisfying. Maybe booth-food wasn’t so bad, after all.

  “Fat Jack is a sleaze,” Lani said matter-of-factly. “He doesn’t just handle bail bonds, he acts as an investigator—which means he produces phony alibis and pays off corrupt cops who want to sell their cases. And he’s worked for Matt Riordan for about twenty-five years. So when Eddie Fitz says the money he handed Paulie the Cork came from Riordan through Fat Jack, I for one have no trouble believing him.”

  She fixed me with her clear brown eyes, eyes that sat in her makeupless face and challenged me. “And when Fat Jack says he got the money from his boss, I have no trouble believing that either. Nor do I find it outside the realm of possibility that the reason Nunzie got dead in a car is that he crossed Matt Riordan and Frankie Cretella. Is this really,” she asked in an uncharacteristically solemn tone of voice, “the kind of guy you want for a client? I know you and he had a thing for a while, but that doesn’t mean—”

  A thing. Yes, that was what you called it when it wasn’t love and it wasn’t exactly an affair either. A friendship with extras, I’d called our relationship when I tried to describe it. A friendship with bed privileges. A thing.

  And now it was over.

  Or was it?

  “That has nothing to do with my representing him,” I said firmly, hoping to hell I was telling the truth. “I can’t stand the way they’re all ganging up on him. This is part of the war against the defense bar,” I went on. “If Lazarus has his way, every defense lawyer who’s any good will find himself facing indictment on something or other.”

  “Cass, come on,” my friend remonstrated, the effect only slightly spoiled by a mouthful of black beans, “you can’t really believe the only reason Matt Riordan is facing indictment is that Lazarus has a vendetta against him. He’s played fast and loose with the system
for a long time—and you’re running a risk of being tarred with the same brush if you take his case.”

  “Oh, that’s nice,” I shot back. “You mean I’m supposed to stand back and let Riordan get railroaded so I can keep my skirts clean? This does not sound like the Lani Rasmussen I used to know.”

  Lani finished her burrito and took a swig of soda. It caught in her throat, producing an unladylike burp. She laughed. “Why did you take this case, anyway?” she asked.

  This was a question to which I’d given a lot of thought since I’d sat across from my client at Tre Scalini. And all the reasons I’d come up with really boiled down to one.

  “Have you ever heard of a place called Cedar Point?” I asked. Lani shook her head. “It’s a big amusement park in Sandusky, Ohio,” I explained. “We used to go there every summer when I was a kid. My brother, Ron, and I would ride the roller coaster, a big old wooden thing called the Blue Streak.” I leaned back on the picnic table and cupped my knee in my hand.

  “We thought that roller coaster was the scariest thing in the world,” I said, letting reminiscence wash over me. “We’d sit in the front car and scream bloody murder when the coaster went around curves. Sometimes it felt as if all the cars were going to run right off the tracks and land us in Lake Erie. We loved the thing.”

  “What’s this got to do with—”

  “Patience,” I said, holding up a restraining hand. “I outgrew Cedar Point for a while,” I went on. “But then I went with a bunch of college friends one summer. I couldn’t wait to show them the Blue Streak. Only a funny thing happened—they’d built a new roller coaster, bigger and faster and scarier. They called it the Mean Streak.”

  I smiled at the memory. Next to the Mean Streak, the old Blue Streak was a kiddie ride. Or so I bragged to my friends as I made my way to the front car of the big new roller coaster.

  “I thought I was going to die,” I told Lani, recounting my first trip. “By the time it was over, I was sobbing with terror and relief. The Mean Streak had lived up to its name.”