Mean Streak

by Carolyn Wheat

  “I was a good cop,” he said. He swallowed; his Adam’s apple jumped in his skinny throat. “I wanted to be a cop more than anything in the world. And I’m so ashamed—”

  His voice broke. He dropped his head; his shoulders heaved. The straight, fine hair fell over his forehead, making him look even more like a teenager confessing to having gotten his best girl in trouble.

  “More than anything in the world,” he said, his tone ragged, his eyes red with unshed tears, “I wish I could have my reputation as a good cop back. That’s what I regret most about all this. That when people hear my name, they won’t remember the good things I did. All they’ll know is that I took part in corrupt acts. They won’t know why. They won’t care that I was trying to help people who were really hurting.”

  “Thank you, Detective,” Davia Singer said. She said the words softly, like an Amen in church. As if to raise her voice would be to intrude on this intensely private moment.

  An intensely private moment I had no doubt had been rehearsed for several hours in the U.S. attorney’s office.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  As I stood up to cross-examine Eddie Fitz, I felt as if the Mean Streak lurched at 100 miles per hour, then plunged down a canyon of steel, rocketing me faster than I’d ever gone before. This was a make-or-break cross; either I damaged Eddie’s credibility in the eyes of the jury or I reconciled myself to watching de Freitas bang Matt away for several years for something I had become increasingly convinced he hadn’t done.

  Eddie had just repeated, in ringing tones, his allegation that Matt had given him a thousand dollars in return for a manila envelope containing secret grand jury minutes.

  A thousand bucks. That alone, I thought as I gazed into Eddie’s cool blue-gray eyes, should have been enough to acquit Matt Riordan. He wore suits that cost more than that every day of the week; he drove a silver Jaguar and ate at the finest restaurants. He was a man of taste and class; he did not take manila envelopes and hand over a fistful of cash to crooked cops.

  It was a bush-league crime, and my client was major league all the way.

  But did that concept constitute a winning summation?

  Looking over at the twelve citizens, plus two alternates, sitting in the jury box, I decided reluctantly that it didn’t.

  “Some nights I went wired,” Eddie Fitz said, using a laconic tone that could have come straight from a Clint Eastwood movie. It was a tone that implied a great deal of worldly wisdom, a lifetime of seeing horrors he would spare us civilians.

  “And how did your boss decide when you should wear the wire and when you could go to the meeting without it?” One thing I’d noticed from my review of the tapes was that whoever made the decision had an unerring instinct for knowing when Eddie would be searched and when he wouldn’t. I was willing to bet the decision was Eddie’s, not a deskbound lawyer’s.

  He bit the bait. “He didn’t. I made all those decisions.” The boast lurked under his deadpan pose.

  “Oh, you decided,” I said in a tone that conveyed admiration. I laid on a little more butter. “I guess I assumed that decision would be made by Nick Lazarus, or by the FBI agent who ‘handled’ you. That is what it’s called, isn’t it?” I went on innocently. “‘Handling’ the informant?”

  He gave a curt nod; just as I’d suspected, he didn’t want to talk about someone else handling him; he wanted to take the credit. So I shifted back to the wire, deciding to give him some rope and see how close he came to hanging himself.

  “But on the night Matt Riordan allegedly handed you money in return for a manila envelope containing grand jury minutes, the night of the most important event in this entire undercover operation, the night you were going to participate in the crime itself, you just happened to go to the meeting without a wire, didn’t you?”

  The answer should have been yes. That was all: yes. I’d carefully crafted the question so that yes was the only possible answer.

  But that wasn’t the answer I got. “Look,” the Hero Cop retorted, “after what almost happened to me the time before that, I sure as hell wasn’t gonna wear a wire to that meet. I nearly got killed.”

  “Objection, Your Honor,” I shouted, trying to drown out the altarboy voice. “Unresponsive to the question.”

  Singer weighed in. “Your Honor,” she proclaimed in ringing tones that carried through the courtroom, “the answer was very responsive. Just because counsel doesn’t like the answer doesn’t make it inadmissible.”

  “Agreed, Ms. Singer,” the judge said. “Overruled. You may proceed, Ms. Jameson.”

  I proceeded. I proceeded to ask Eddie Fitz questions all over the lot, dredging up the names of every junkie I intended to call to the stand, mentioning TJ’s name too, as if I could somehow convince Eddie the dealer was going to rise from the dead, step into the courthouse, and call him a liar. I was laying the groundwork for what I knew would be a futile attempt to undermine the Hero Cop’s credibility. I was also hoping to bury the memory of Eddie Fitz talking about his life being in danger.

  But the problem with cross-examination is that it’s followed by redirect. The other side gets to stand up and repair whatever damage you’ve done. Which was what Davia Singer hastened to do.

  She asked about the night Eddie had mentioned, the night he said his life was in danger. I objected. I approached the bench. We even took it outside into the corridor behind the courtroom and argued on the record for fifteen minutes. But in the end, the judge ruled that I’d opened the door on cross.

  The little smirk Singer gave me as we returned to the courtroom told me I’d walked into a trap. Eddie Fitz had been coached to answer my question the way that he had, to sneak in a reference to the incident on cross so that Singer could make a big splash on redirect, tell the jury something they hadn’t heard before.

  It was a nice trick, and I felt a fool at having fallen for it. I wondered, as I walked back to counsel table, whether Riordan would have let it happen, or if he would have found some way to close this door I’d inadvertently opened.

  It didn’t matter. What mattered was that Eddie Fitz started telling the jurors how he almost lost his life because he’d gone wired to the meeting just prior to the one at which he said Riordan paid him off.

  “See, they heard talk,” Eddie explained. “Paulie says they heard a rumor in the precinct about a cop turned bad, a cop who was working for Lazarus, helping put a rope around other cops’ necks. And somehow they heard that cop was me.”

  Singer asked just enough questions to keep the flow coming. Eddie sat at his ease in the witness chair, shooting the breeze the way he would have at a cop bar. Only instead of cop stories told to impress the groupies, this was testimony under oath, guaranteed to put my client behind bars.

  “So this one night, Paulie says to me, ‘Nobody likes a rat, Eddie.’ I say to him, ‘Who you callin’ a rat? Are we back on that shit again, Paulie? You think I’m a rat, search me,’ I tell him. ‘Open my coat. What the fuck,’ I say—excuse me, Your Honor, but that’s what I said—‘what the fuck, open my pants, take out my dick and see if I got a wire wrapped around it. And while you got my pants open, you can kiss my—’”

  I objected. No grounds, just general principles. Overruled, but at least I broke the spell. For a second and a half.

  “The thing that had me nearly shitting my pants—pardon the expression, Your Honor—is that I was wearin’ the wire. I was bluffin’ all the way with that talk about how I was gonna open my coat.”

  I jumped to my feet. I’d listened to every tape in the prosecutor’s arsenal; why hadn’t I heard this one before?

  In the hallway, out of the hearing of the bewildered jurors, I made my pitch strong and hot. “Your Honor,” I argued, fueled by a passion for fairness that was all too real, “the defense moves for a mistrial. This evidence was never turned over to the defense prior to trial; I’ve heard every single tape and I have no copy of this one.”

  De Freitas turned to Singer, whose answer tripped o
ff her tongue with a swiftness that said she had all the bases covered. “Your Honor,” she said, “the truth is that the recording equipment failed on the night in question. There is no recorded evidence of this incident; if there had been, it would most certainly have been turned over at arraignment along with the other tapes.”

  “Do you really expect me to believe that?” My voice cracked; I was too furious to think about the consequences of my words. “You waltz in here at the last minute and fill the jurors’ ears with a load of crap about Eddie nearly getting killed, and you haven’t even got it on tape?”

  “Ms. Jameson,” the judge intoned, giving me a black look, “if you’re accusing the United States Attorney of something dishonest, I warn you I don’t take kindly to tactics like that in my courtroom.”

  “What about tactics like letting a witness testify to an uncharged crime, Your Honor?” I protested. “There isn’t one shred of evidence that Matt Riordan was present on the night in question, and nothing to indicate that he knew about the alleged incident, and yet the jury is being allowed to speculate that he had something to do with this so-called threat to Detective Fitzgerald’s life.”

  “Your Honor,” Singer explained in a voice that held no hint of doubt about the rightness of her own position, “this evidence is not being admitted for the truth of the allegations. It is admitted for the sole purpose of disproving Ms. Jameson’s theory of why Detective Fitzgerald wore no wire on the night the money changed hands.”

  “Oh, that’s beautiful,” I countered. “You want the jury to disregard the testimony about Eddie Fitz nearly buying the farm. That’s not supposed to prejudice them against Matt Riordan by association. They’re only supposed to listen to the part that says why Eddie didn’t go to the next meeting wired for sound.”

  In the end, Eddie was permitted to continue his story. I had a motion for a mistrial on the record; I’d have to bone up on federal appeals. Although if my friend Lani was right, my chances on appeal were about one-fifth as good as they were at the trial level. And we were getting creamed at the trial level.

  “So Fat Jack said, ‘We heard you were talking to Lazarus, that you’re going to rat out a bunch of cops you work with,’” Eddie Fitz said. The jurors hung on every word; this was at least as good as what they saw every week on television.

  “So I said, ‘Hey, the whole squad is acting crazy. Everybody’s lookin’ at everybody else, wondering who’s going to bring who down. So I try to lighten things up a little, make a joke out of it.’” Eddie Fitz turned his guileless eyes on the jury and gave a sheepish little shrug. “I’m trying to talk my way out of it,” he explained, “like I always done. Only this time, they’re pushing me around. I’m on the street with the two of them, and Fat Jack is pushing me down the street. It’s late, I’m alone out there, and I’m really getting scared.

  “I tell them, ‘You think a guy who’s really working for Lazarus is going to go around making jokes?’ Then Fat Jack says, ‘Some things you don’t make jokes about, Eddie. Like things that could put our asses in a sling.’”

  Singer slid another question into the monologue. Eddie paced the story nicely; the jurors were glued to his every word.

  “Paulie pushed me into an alley near Fat Jack’s office,” Eddie went on. “He tried to get under my coat. I told him to stand back or I’d shoot his pecker off. He laughed. ‘You never carry a gun off-duty, Eddie,’ he says. ‘Everybody knows that.’ And the truth was, he was right. I had no gun. But Paulie did. He had it and he pulled it out and I swear I thought I was gonna die right there, only a uniformed cop came around the corner and asked if everything was all right. I don’t know where the hell my backup was, but I followed that cop out of the alley and walked away. I felt lucky to be alive, that’s all I can say.”

  I glanced at the jurors. They were eating it up. Mouths hung open, eyes avidly took in the sight of the Hero Cop downplaying his courage under fire.

  Before I could begin recross, the judge banged his gavel and adjourned for the day.

  I had to walk. I had to get out of that courthouse before I exploded into a thousand red-hot pieces. If someone had handed me a machine gun, I would have held it at waist-level and mowed down everyone in my path. I wanted Judge de Freitas dead, I wanted Nick Lazarus pinned to the ground with fire ants crawling all over his writhing body. I wanted Davia Singer’s head on a Thanksgiving turkey platter. I wanted—

  I wanted to turn back the clock to that night at Tre Scalini and tell Matthew Daniel Riordan to get another lawyer.

  I had to walk. My pumps had two-and-a-half-inch heels (a compromise; Matt had wanted three-inchers to shape my calves, and I’d told him two inches was my limit) and a skirt that clung to my hips. I was wearing a silk blouse that cost more than the outfit I’d previously considered my best suit. I was not dressed for a hike, but I had to walk.

  I said as much to Riordan. His failure to protest clued me into the fact that I was wearing the facial expression of a Fury; nobody with any sense of self-preservation was going to get in my way. I sped past the press, plastering a smile on my face.

  My legs hurt already. I didn’t care. I had to walk. I strode past the Municipal Building and crossed the street at the light. Halfway across, I walked along the traffic island until I came to the walkway to the Brooklyn Bridge.

  The Eighth Wonder of the World, they’d called it when it was finished in 1883. The tallest edifice in New York City, or any other city at the time, it spans the East River in a graceful arc. Its huge, weathered Gothic arches created a cathedral effect that calmed me the minute I stepped onto the planked walkway in the middle of the bridge. On either side, traffic sped by in opposite directions. To my left, the Manhattan Bridge stood in all its pedestrian glory, a monument to what engineering looked like without the poetry.

  I stopped abruptly, causing the backpacker behind me to glare as he walked around me. I turned back. I was just far enough away from Manhattan to get a glimpse of skyline through the intricate webbing of the bridge’s cables. The summer sun was still high behind the jagged towers. The Woolworth Building added a wedding-cake touch to the angular skyline, and City Hall was a tiny jewel box amid the taller spires. God, it was lovely. New York through the Brooklyn Bridge was once again the city of my dreams, the city I’d chosen to call my own.

  I gave a huge sigh, expelling stale air from my lungs as if draining all the poison trapped inside me. My anger began to melt. My shoulders dropped two inches; I gave a good shrug and let my arms swing back and forth. I did a quick series of yoga breaths to purify my lungs, then laughed aloud as I realized I was breathing exhaust from hundreds of cars.

  I was free. Just for a moment, just for now, I was free. Free of the trial and Eddie Fitz, of Dwight Straub and Matt Riordan.

  I spread out my arms and whirled around, like Julie Andrews at the beginning of The Sound of Music. A jogger sweating and panting ran by and gave me a grin; I grinned back. Behind him came another jogger—this one was juggling as he ran. Three balls floated in the air; he caught them one by one and tossed them back up, running and juggling. Bicyclists passed me on the other side of the walkway, puffing and grunting as they made their way up the incline. They’d coast on the other side, going downhill, but this side was work.

  I wasn’t the only pedestrian in a business suit, but I was the only one with heels. Anyone with brains wore athletic shoes to walk the bridge, leaving the dress shoes back in the office or carrying them in a briefcase. My legs were cramping up. I looked down at my feet, at the newly laid replacement planks in the walkway, and made a decision. I reached down and slipped off my pumps, letting my stockinged feet touch the wood. I had to watch for splinters, but already my calves thanked me.

  The pumps dangled from my fingers as I walked. The wood was hot, but not too hot for comfort. It felt good, like walking on the boardwalk at the beach. I was almost to the first set of columns, the one with the plaque in honor of Mrs. Roebling. I always stopped at that plaque and thought about
the woman who’d helped her ailing husband finish his dream.

  I turned back toward Manhattan; the sun was a touch lower in the sky; golden light bathed the river and glinted off the windows of the city. Uptown, the Empire State and Chrysler buildings seemed like toys, tiny and delicate.

  I looked toward Brooklyn, where the huge Watchtower sign dominated the skyline. Closer to the bridge were the piers. Moored to one was a barge that offered classical music concerts every Sunday.

  Manhattan and Brooklyn had been sister cities when the bridge was begun by John Augustus Roebling; they’d become boroughs of the unified city once it was finished. But the separate entities they had once been still existed, and nowhere more sharply than in the court system. Not only were the state courts different, not only did each borough cherish and foster those differences, but there were two federal courts as well. The Southern District, in Manhattan, was the jewel in the crown of federal courts. Its United States attorneys made headlines. The Eastern District, in Brooklyn, was the plain stepsister, always playing catchup. Not even the trial of John Gotti had brought the Eastern District the notoriety it felt it deserved.

  I acknowledged Emily Roebling’s plaque with a nod and kept moving. My nylons were snagged irreparably and my feet were beginning to blister. I stopped and put my shoes back on, deciding that cramped calves might be an improvement. They weren’t, but I kept walking, anyway. Limping, holding onto the railing, I made my way to the Brooklyn side, to the home side, of the Great Bridge.

  The Eastern District courthouse was right across from the park that began where the bridge ended. I could stop on the way home. I could stop and see whether Dominic Di Blasi was in. And even if he wasn’t, I could pick up some information about Fat Jack Vance’s case.

  Two sister cities. Two sister court systems. Two federal prosecutors who both wanted Matt Riordan’s scalp on their belts. And Lazarus had won and Di Blasi had lost. But Di Blasi was still a player; his recommendation on Fat Jack’s sentence made that clear. Instead of the easy walk he’d been promised, the bail bondsman was going to do time. Why?