“When was this?” Fat Jack’s legal instincts were correct; the defense absolutely should have been told about this. I was going back into the courtroom loaded for bear.
“I don’t know, sometime after I gave Paulie the money for the grand jury minutes, though. In fact,” he admitted after a moment’s thought, “it was after the Riordan thing was over with. I was trying to get some information on a wholly different matter at the time, nothing to do with Matty.”
“But at some point, you knew about Eddie working for Lazarus, and you never told Riordan?” I persisted.
“Hey, it was after the fact, you know. It was after I paid the money. And I wanted to tell Matty, I really did, but Lazarus had my balls in a wringer. He said, ‘You breathe a word to Riordan, I’ll see to it you do heavy time in that Brooklyn case.’ So I had no choice. I had no fucking choice.”
“But you have a choice now,” I shot back. “You could come to court and tell the jury that you paid Paulie for those minutes on your own hook, that Matt had nothing to do with it.”
“No, I can’t, Ms. J.,” Fat Jack replied, his voice a mournful dirge. “Because when I gave that money to Paulie the Cork, I was just doing what Matt Riordan told me to do.”
This was not the answer I wanted; the only thing that made it tolerable was that I didn’t believe it for a second.
“How about when you posted bond for a man named TJ?” I countered. “Were you just doing what Nick Lazarus asked you to do?”
If the question hit a nerve, Fat Jack didn’t let it show.
“That’s what I do,” he said simply. “I write bonds. I must have wrote a thousand bonds this year, and it’s only summer. So maybe I wrote one for a guy known as TJ. I could have done that.”
“And maybe you could also have gone to the Brooklyn House of Detention to post the money in person,” I went on. “And maybe you also walked out of BHD with TJ. And maybe you were the last guy to see TJ alive.”
The fat man shook his head; the jowls waggled again. “No, I wasn’t, Ms. J.,” he said in his wheezy voice. “I wasn’t the last man to see TJ alive. Because I delivered TJ to the man who actually paid the bond-piece.”
“Nick Lazarus,” I guessed. “Did you take him to the U.S. attorney’s office, or did you—”
“Who said anything about Lazarus?” Fat Jack cut in, his huge face wreathed in a smile meant to convey innocence. “I took him to the cops who registered him as an informant. I took him to Stan Krieger and Dwight Straub.”
CHAPTER TEN
“I can’t believe the way those reporters turned that poor guy’s death into a feeding frenzy this morning,” I said morosely. Matt and I had agreed to meet in the cool interior of McSorley’s for a much needed drink. “How do you suppose Straub’s wife is feeling?”
“You can’t let yourself worry about that,” my companion replied. “You were brilliant back there,” he went on. “The way you shifted the focus in the courtroom from Straub to TJ, the way you had Lazarus on the defensive. You really came out slugging, Cass—just the way I would have done.”
“Praise from Riordan is praise indeed,” I murmured, savoring the irony as much as I savored the vodka and cranberry juice he’d ordered for me. “I’m glad you appreciate my sacrificing my career on the altar of your acquittal.”
“Your career is safe, babe,” Matt assured me with an indulgent smile. “We’ve got Lazarus on the run and he knows it.”
“Meanwhile,” I mused aloud, “poor Dwight Straub shoots himself because he thinks I’m about to pin TJ’s murder on him, when the truth is I had no real evidence until Fat Jack gave me the whole thing on a silver platter.”
“Somebody would have found out sometime,” Matt replied. He placed his warm hand over mine and gave a gentle squeeze.
We sat in silence for a moment, a silence that might almost have been a moment of remembrance for the terrified man who’d left my subpoena with his suicide note. Then Riordan said, “And we still have to cross Eddie tomorrow on that bullshit about Jack nearly killing him.”
“I’d forgotten about that,” I admitted. It was partly the nature of trials and partly the nature of life: What had seemed so vitally important earlier now meant little or nothing, in the context of Dwight’s suicide. But Matt was right. The trial would continue, and we’d have to wipe from the jurors’ minds the image of the Hero Cop narrowly escaping with his life.
“There’s something off about that, don’t you think?” Matt said. He leaned forward on his chair, a predatory look on his face. “He’s got Fat Jack going on about killing him if he rats them out, but then when Jack has real evidence that Fitz is a rat, he just stands there and makes more threats. Why didn’t Jack pull the trigger in that alley?”
“Are you really asking why your former associate didn’t kill this guy?” I asked incredulously. “That would make a nice comment for the jury. Besides,” I went on, “are you saying you think Fat Jack is capable of murder?”
“To save his own ass? Of course he is.” Matt lifted his glass of Irish whiskey and held it in the air. “And what I’m wondering is, why didn’t he take advantage of a perfectly good opportunity to plug the little shit and walk away?”
“Because that uniformed cop came along,” I replied.
“Not for a good ten minutes,” my client countered. “Jack had plenty of time to kill Eddie if he really wanted to. I can’t help but wonder if the whole episode wasn’t a show.”
“A show for the jury?” I was thinking aloud.
Riordan shook his head. “A show for Paulie the Cork,” he said.
I thought about it. “You think Jack and Eddie planned the whole thing? You think Fat Jack pretended to threaten Eddie? Then what about—”
I broke off as a sudden revelation hit me. What had Zebart testified to about Eddie? That he’d never seen anyone with such an unerring sense of when to wear a wire and when to leave the equipment back in the office. It was as if Eddie had radar, the FBI man had said. It was as if he’d known in advance when Fat Jack was going to search him.
It was as if he’d known in advance.
What if he had known in advance? What if he and Fat Jack had orchestrated their little dance, the ballet of trust and distrust that led to the damning tapes?
But why?
Because Eddie Fitz was a liar. He was no hero cop; he was a crooked cop who wanted to cut a deal that would let him walk away from his misconduct while his buddies served time. And the best way to do that was to turn state’s evidence before anyone else thought of doing it.
“Jack found a memo,” I remarked. I told Matt what the bondsman had told me about the internal memorandum from Lazarus to an undercover cop. “So at least part of the time he was pretending to believe Eddie, Jack knew the truth. He was on the prosecution’s payroll.”
“That’s why they didn’t call Jack to the stand,” Riordan said in an authoritative tone. “If they presented him as a witness, they’d have had to give us that information.”
“I don’t know where this gets us,” I continued. “I feel as if every time I acquire another piece of information, it turns to garbage. I mean, we know for a fact that Eddie Fitz is a crooked cop, and that Nick Lazarus knew it and put him on the stand anyway, and let him lie through his teeth—and we have no more concrete evidence of any of that than we did the day we first learned about it.”
We sat in McSorley’s until the sun made its way below the horizon. As I walked with Matt toward the subway that would take me back to Brooklyn, I watched the huge red ball slowly descending into the Hudson, hanging in the sky like a Japanese lantern, sending long, slanting rays of orange light along the streets. There was a wispy breeze off the East River. The street was alive with people. Lovers of all ages and gender combinations strolled hand in hand, lazing their way along Third Avenue past Indian restaurants and boutiques devoted to leather in all its various forms. Musicians plucked guitars or played South American pipes or fiddled in front of open cases with a buck or two lying i
nside to encourage passers-by to toss in more cash. In front of the Ukranian restaurant a mime imitated people as they walked by; I smiled as he picked up Matt’s intense stride, jutting his head forward as though to cut his way through the very air around us.
There was a doleful little tune playing in my head. It had been there ever since McSorley’s, nagging at me until I managed to identify it. It was a folk song, something about a boat. Something about a big lake they called Gitche Gumee.
I gave a wry little laugh when the title came to me: “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.” It was a long, lugubrious ballad about the sinking of a Lake Superior barge, sung by Gordon Lightfoot.
The wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald. Was I thinking of the wreck Eddie Fitz had made of his own life, or of the others he had taken down with him to the bottom of the lake?
Back in Brooklyn, I had messages on my answering machine and a spew of faxes to read through. I was about to toss them into the pile I’d mentally marked “After Trial,” when a reference to Eddie Fitz caught my attention. I sat down on my red leather office chair and began to read.
“Do you really think Eddie is that stupid?” the fax began. “Do you think he’d talk to Nick Lazarus without protecting himself? Well, he wouldn’t. He wore a wire and he made a tape of everything he said. He kept the tape in the barbecue in his backyard so no one would find it. Only I found it, and I can give it to you in return for two thousand dollars. Meet me tonight in front of St. Andrew’s Church at 11:00. Don’t be late—and bring all the money.”
There was no signature. The heading identified the sender as a public copy shop in the courthouse district of lower Manhattan. It was not the first such offer I’d received since the trial began. It seemed as if the entire population of Manhattan wanted to help me win Matt’s case—for a small, eminently reasonable fee, of course. But this was different. For one thing, whoever had written this knew Eddie’s penchant for taping his own conversations. For another, we needed all the ammunition we could get to make good our promise to show the judge that Lazarus had bent the rules.
I called Matt and read the fax to him over the phone. “I’ll be right there,” he said in a tight, excited voice. “A half-hour at the most.”
I walked upstairs to my apartment and stripped off my working clothes. After tossing the sweat-damp pantyhose into the sink for a quick wash, I slipped into jogging shorts and put on the fish-on-a-bicycle T-shirt. Then I trudged back downstairs and left a note for Matt to ring the apartment bell instead of the office. It was too damned late and too damned hot to keep it professional. I opened a diet soda and stretched out on the couch.
I was half-asleep by the time my client rang the bell. I buzzed him up, and set the fax on the coffee table for him to read. I met him at the door with a cold beer.
“Where is it?” he said by way of greeting. I gestured toward the coffee table and stood back.
“This could be good,” he said after a minute. “This could be very good.”
“This could also be a complete crock,” I pointed out. “A wild-goose chase, a waste of time, a scam, a fraud, a blackmail scheme, a—”
“I know all that,” Matt interrupted, “but it could also be just what we need. Think about it,” he urged. He tossed the fax back onto the coffee table and began to pace the living room. “We know Eddie Fitz made a tape of his Psych Services interview, in defiance of Police Department regulations. So is it wholly out of the realm of possibility that he sneaked a tape recorder into Nick Lazarus’ office and taped his conversations there?”
I shook my head. “Not completely,” I replied, giving Matt what he wanted. “That does sound like something Eddie might do.”
“Of course it does,” Matt said approvingly. “Because if we manage to nail Eddie Fitz as a liar, you and I both know Lazarus is going to turn on him. He’ll tell the court he never had a moment’s suspicion about Eddie, but now that he knows the truth, he’ll rush straight to the grand jury and indict the former Hero Cop. And Eddie’s just smart enough to know that the best way to guarantee that won’t happen is to have his own insurance policy; namely, a tape of Lazarus listening to every horrible thing Eddie ever did on the street.”
“I understand all that,” I said, not liking the excited undercurrents in Matt’s voice. “What I don’t believe is that this anonymous faxer has any such tapes. Why would Eddie leave them around where someone else could find them that easily? And who is this person, and what does he really want?”
“He wants two thousand bucks,” my client retorted.
It came to me as I contemplated Matt’s too-smooth skin that he’d had plastic surgery. He’d had a face lift. And maybe an eye job. And a tummy tuck—Was that why his stomach still looked flat as a washboard?
“Is that all he wants?” I asked in a soft voice. “Can you be sure he doesn’t want something you’re not going to want to give?”
“All I know,” Matt replied, “is that come eleven P.M., I’m going to be standing in front of St. Andrew’s Church. If I’m wasting my time, so be it. It’s my time.”
We agreed to meet at 7:15 the next morning, outside the courthouse at the round metal tables next to the food booths, to discuss the results of his night’s activities.
It was late. And hot. And the air conditioning felt good and so did the gins and tonic I made and so did sitting on the couch tucked neatly into Matt’s sinewy arm, the television soothing us with a meaningless flow of images we scarcely noticed. He smelled so good; he had always smelled so good: a combination of male sweat and citrusy after-shave that roused something inside me.
His hand brushed the front of my T-shirt and stiffened my braless nipple. The arm around my shoulders squeezed me close to him. I gave a contented sound and let my hand travel across his shirt. The hair on his broad chest felt springy under my fingertips; I wanted to reach in and pet him like a dog.
He reached down and covered my mouth with his lips. His meaty hand crept under my T-shirt and cupped my breast as he thrust his tongue into my willing mouth.
A hot rush of desire flooded me; I wanted the release, the closeness, the sound of his breath as he lay on my bed next to me, the touch of his manicured hands on my skin, the give and take of good, strong sex, the—
I wanted him.
And in very short order, I gave myself what I wanted.
The sex was great. Raw, animal passion that released a lot of the tension I’d been under. I lay on sweat-soaked sheets, my fingers idly roaming through the hairs on Matt’s chest, the cool blast of air conditioning wafting over my satisfied body.
“It’s too bad you have to go,” I said. “But I guess you’re right. You have to go meet this guy, whoever he is. You won’t be satisfied unless you—”
His hand grabbed mine too tightly. “Ah, babe, let’s cut the shit. It doesn’t matter what this guy has. I’m finished, and we both know it.”
I sat upright in bed. “What are you talking about? We have Eddie Fitz on the ropes and Lazarus in the hot seat. You have a really good chance of winning this thing.”
“I told you from the beginning,” he said, his deep blue eyes focused on my face, “winning wasn’t going to be enough.”
I was getting nettled. “Then what would be enough? A public apology from Nick Lazarus? A medal from the mayor?” I smiled; there used to be a judge in Brooklyn who said that to all the criminal lawyers when they argued bail motions. What does your client want, Counselor, a medal?
But Matt wasn’t smiling. He heaved a sigh. “There’s an old courthouse story I used to tell,” he began. “Always got a laugh with it, too. There’s a criminal lawyer on trial with a dead loser of a case. But he cross-examines, he objects, he argues—he puts on a show. And when he’s finished, his client looks at him and says, “This is wonderful. We’re really doing great.’”
I knew where this was going, but I kept quiet and let Matt go for the punch line.
“The lawyer turns to his client and says, ‘No, moron. I’m doing great
; you’re going down the toilet.’”
“But you’re not going down the toilet.”
“My life is,” he replied, in a voice that wavered. He turned his face away, not quite burying it in the pillow, but with a decisiveness that told me not to come any closer.
Part of me figured he was just crashing from his earlier high, which had been fueled by alcohol, adrenaline, and optimism. And part of me knew exactly what he meant.
“You’ll get your life back,” I promised, working to exude a confidence I didn’t entirely feel. “Once all this is over, you’ll be turning clients away, just like you used to.”
He cleared his throat and swallowed the phlegm in a throaty gurgle. His voice was thick with what I hoped to hell weren’t unshed tears. “No, babe,” he said. “Clients like the ones I had don’t give replays. When they’re gone, they’re gone. And as far as they’re concerned, I’m yesterday. Kurt’s their lawyer now. And maybe he can keep Frankie C. happy and maybe he can’t, but I’ll never see a Cretella case again.”
“So you’ll—”
Now his voice was back to its full, round timbre. It rang with authority as he cut in: “Save the locker-room speech, Cass. I know what I know.”
He reached over and stroked my naked flesh, raising goose bumps as his fingers touched sensitive spots. “I’ve got to go. Thanks, Cass,” he said. “Thanks a lot.”
“I hope you get what you need,” I replied. It sounded inadequate as hell, but it was what I hoped.
It was only later that the irony of those words came home to me.
The F station at East Broadway was deep underground; it was the first stop in Manhattan, and the sense of having been underneath the East River was overwhelming. The station was deep and damp and cool, as if I were stepping out of the subway car straight into riverbed.
I climbed toward the sunlight and emerged from darkness at the corner of East Broadway and Canal Street, on the northern edge of Chinatown. It took a moment for my eyes to adjust to the light. It was going to be another hot day, and the sun streamed down on the tenement houses, glinted off windows and fire escapes and the triangular gold top of the federal courthouse, visible along the straight line of East Broadway.
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