“You,” I said to Zebart, putting a finger closer to his face than politeness permitted, “stop interrogating my client. I haven’t heard Miranda warnings, and yet it’s obvious you consider him a suspect. Either arrest him or leave him alone.”
Then I wheeled on Riordan. “And you,” I continued, moving the finger in his direction, “shut up. Stop showing everyone how cool you are in the face of intimidation. These people, in case you’ve forgotten, are not jurors you have to impress. They’re law enforcement officers who’d like nothing more than to march you away in handcuffs.”
I took a deep breath and looked up at the top of the courthouse steps. Bright yellow crime-scene tape surrounded a large square area; the cops had brought blue sawhorses for crowd control. The reporters and minicams had arrived; they stood at the foot of the stairs, waiting for someone to come down and give them sound bites.
“One thing about working for the Bureau,” Zebart said with a wolfish grin, “they’ve got one hell of a support staff. Anything you ask for, you can get in record time.”
I wasn’t sure where the big FBI man was going with this, but the complacent look on his face told me it wasn’t going to be anywhere I wanted him to go. I was certain of this when he pulled an official-looking paper out of his jacket pocket and handed it to me.
“What’s this?” I asked. I opened it, read it, and handed it to Matt.
“It’s a search warrant,” I said in a tone dulled by shock. “It authorizes Agent Zebart to search you for a weapon.”
Matt opened his silk-lined suit jacket to reveal a shoulder holster. Zebart reached in and gingerly pulled out the sleek black gun in a practiced two-fingered hold that was designed to preserve any fingerprints.
“We’ll just take this along to the lab,” the agent said. “See if it’s been fired recently, see if the bullets match the ones that blew Detective Fitzgerald’s head to bits.”
I felt like a prize idiot. Why hadn’t I asked my client if he’d come armed to the plaza the night before?
Was it because I was afraid to hear the answer, afraid to acknowledge that Matt’s rage at Eddie Fitz could very easily have driven him to the top of the courthouse steps? That to a man who viewed a criminal trial as nothing less than war, acquittal wasn’t victory enough?
Only death would do.
“I’m not getting your point,” Lani protested. I’d broken through the gantlet of reporters and made my way to her office for a little coffee and sympathy. Coffee, I had. Sympathy, I was still waiting for. “The ballistics people will test Matt’s gun and they’ll realize it’s not the one that killed Eddie, so what’s the problem?”
“Lani, don’t be naive. Of course Matt’s gun didn’t kill Eddie. At least,” I amended, “the gun he carried in that holster didn’t.”
“I repeat, if Matt’s gun didn’t kill Eddie, then—”
“Matt Riordan is one of the smartest people I’ve ever met,” I retorted. “Of course he’s not going to kill the chief witness against him and then carry a smoking gun around with him the next day. If he killed Eddie, then he did it with another gun. A gun that can’t be traced to him. A gun he got rid of as soon as he used it. A gun that—”
“Why wouldn’t he just throw the gun down next to the body?” Lani asked. “I’ve heard of Mafia guys doing that. They use an untraceable gun and then just leave it for the cops, knowing it won’t do them any good.”
“Hell, maybe the killer did toss the gun,” I replied glumly. “I wouldn’t be surprised if someone saw it lying there and stole it.” Then I remembered Eddie’s ankle holster. It would be hard to accept a thief stealing the murder weapon and leaving a perfectly good gun on the corpse.
“So the FBI has Matt’s gun,” Lani persisted. “It’ll come back clean, and Matt will be in the clear.”
“Your simple faith is so touching,” I remarked. “In the first place, who’s to say the Bureau isn’t going to fudge the results to nail Matt? But even if they don’t, Zebart stood there in the open plaza and searched him. They treated him like a mutt. I know at least one of the reporters saw what they were doing. I won’t be surprised to see pictures spread over the front page of the Post. If they can’t destroy Matt with real evidence, in a courtroom, they can ruin him in the media. How many people want a criminal defense lawyer who’s been searched in public by an FBI agent?”
“You don’t think his future clients will feel a bond with a man who’s been the victim of mistaken suspicion?”
“I do not. And neither do you, if you think about it. Hell, Frankie Cretella already has a new lawyer, and I don’t think he’s coming back to Matt no matter what happens.”
“So even though you’ve won,” Lani summed up, “you’ve lost.”
“And you can finish that thought and say you told me so,” I went on. “You can remind me that you warned me I’d be tarred with the same brush if I defended Matt. You can—”
“What I can do,” my old friend said in a tone that could slice day-old pumpernickel, “is let you in on the latest courthouse gossip about Nick Lazarus. That ought to put the roses back in your cheeks.”
“Only if the latest courthouse gossip says that Nick Lazarus walked out of his office late last night packing a gun and used it to blow away his star witness,” I retorted.
“Almost as good,” Lani promised. I perked up. She sat at her desk in a characteristic pose, nyloned feet propped up on an opened drawer, Bass loafers on the floor beside the desk. Her dark hair was an uncombed mop; she raked her short fingers through it, making an even bigger mess, then began her tale.
“Word is that Lazarus threw one of his famous shit-fits last night,” she said. “The whole courthouse heard him. Or at least,” she amended, “those who were still here at about ten or so. Which, before you ask,” she added, holding up a warning hand, “didn’t include me. I was home in the bosom of my little family.”
“How is Lil?” I asked. Lani’s lover was a civil court judge.
“She’s fine,” Lani said. “Now stop interrupting and listen. This is going to make your day.”
I complied. A kind of calm settled over me, the first peace I’d felt since I’d stumbled upon Eddie’s corpse that morning. I’d get through this, I decided; I had friends, and with friends all things were possible.
“I heard he ripped Singer up one side and down the other for not telling him about Eddie—and that she screamed back that he’d known all along and if he thought he was going to hang it all on her, he had another think coming because she had contemporaneous notes.” Lani gave a conspiratorial grin and said in a wry voice, “Isn’t it amazing to hear a fight between lawyers? Even when we’re threatening one another, we do it within the rules of evidence. ‘Contemporaneous notes,’” she mocked, “‘past recollection recorded.’ As if in the very moment she’s defending herself against Lazarus, she’s got one eye on admissibility of evidence.”
“Well, hell,” I protested, “there’s every reason to think this will end up in court. And Singer’s too smart not to realize Lazarus would try to dump it all on her. I can hear him now: ‘Your Honor, I didn’t know what my assistant was up to. I never would have countenanced such a thing if I’d been informed.’”
“Well, in any case, it was a shouting match that was heard three floors away. And the upshot of it was that Lazarus started screaming that he ought to indict Eddie for perjury.”
“There’s a three hundred and sixty degree turn for you,” I observed. “Lazarus indicts his star witness.”
“That would be one way to distance himself from Eddie’s corruption,” Lani suggested. “It would be telling the world he didn’t approve of Eddie’s lies, and that he didn’t cover them up.”
“But it would also open a huge can of worms,” I argued. “Judge de Freitas would take the U.S. attorney’s office apart, making sure there was nothing in there that pointed to Lazarus or Singer’s having known the truth about Eddie. No judge wants to be made a fool of, and if Lazarus put Eddie on the s
tand knowing he was a liar and a scumbag, de Freitas is going to flay Lazarus alive. What Mart’s just been through will look like a Sunday school picnic,” I added, with more than a touch of relish.
“There is, believe it or not, more,” Lani said. She smiled, and her plain face lit up with mischief. “I was going to tell you this earlier, but I didn’t get a chance. I wasn’t sure what you could do with it, but I thought you ought to know, anyway. Guess who was shacked up with Eddie every night?”
“Not Davia Singer!” I was genuinely shocked. When will women lawyers learn not to sleep with witnesses?
Then I dropped my eyes, remembering Matt and me the night before.
When we learn not to sleep with defendants, I answered myself in a rueful inner voice.
Lani nodded. “And my sources tell me this had been going on for a while. They also tell me Eddie, who you may recall was married, was about to break it off, and that Singer was pissed as hell. I’m not sure it qualifies as a Fatal Attraction situation, but it is nice and messy.”
“So that’s who Singer was waiting for by the sculpture,” I mused aloud. “She must have stood there every night, waiting for Lazarus to let Eddie go home. Then the two of them would waltz off to her place and—”
“And do the horizontal mambo,” Lani finished. “Like I said, I don’t know how this helps, but—”
“Does she have a gun?”
“She could,” Lani pointed out. “U.S. attorneys are authorized to carry weapons. And I know Lazarus has one; remember, he was attacked a few years ago, and went very public about buying a gun and learning how to use it.”
I nodded. So now we not only had four suspects wandering through Police Plaza the night Eddie died, all four of them had the right to carry a weapon—and the means to find a weapon that couldn’t be traced to them. And they each had motives: Lazarus would find it considerably less messy to kill Eddie than to indict him; Singer was the classic dumped woman; Krieger knew Eddie could send him to jail; and Matt Riordan wanted not just to win his case, but to destroy his enemies.
I made a token visit to Judge de Freitas’ chambers on the way out of the courthouse. He’d adjourned the case to give the prosecution time to respond to my motion to dismiss, but there was little real doubt that with Eddie dead he’d have no choice but to throw out the charges against Matt. We hadn’t finished cross-examination, and without a full cross, Matt wouldn’t have received the fair trial guaranteed by the Constitution.
Afterwards, I dragged myself back to Brooklyn, emotionally and physically exhausted. I walked into the Morning Glory and told my troubles to Dorinda—who began explaining to me why I shouldn’t be upset that Riordan had deserted me for his lemon-haired lady the night before.
“Stop pouring oil on troubled waters,” I muttered, poking a newly unwrapped straw into my cherry milkshake. “I like my waters troubled.”
“Yes, but how do you like the milkshake?” Dorinda countered, her hands on her hips. Her apron sported giant shadow-print cherries on a sky-blue background. It was one of her many Lassie’s-mom vintage aprons.
“Sweet,” I replied after a hefty swallow. “And thick. It’s hard work to get this stuff through the straw.”
“I think you have a piece of cherry stuck in the bottom,” she remarked with an air of expertise. “That happens a lot with fresh cherry shakes.”
I was drinking a cherry milkshake in honor of the Morning Glory’s Second Annual Cherry Festival. Dorinda had grown up in the lakeside town of Traverse City, Michigan, and she had fond memories of her hometown’s annual early July homage to the red fruit. She had drawn the line at serving the cherry meatballs that had won her mom a third prize one year in the entree category, but her menu overflowed with cherry shakes, sundaes, pies, tarts, danishes, muffins, and scones. She had even mashed up a cherry-and-cream cheese concoction for spreading on a bagel, and she had tried to interest me in a cherry-flavored iced tea instead of my usual iced coffee. Fat chance.
She’d been trying to jolly me out of my anger at Matt Riordan; now she just laughed. “That must be what kept you two together all that time,” she said. “I think you both like troubled waters better than calm ones. Who knows?” she went on. “Maybe this trial will bring you together again.”
I shook my head. “Not if he’s going to make a practice of hopping from my bed to Taylor’s.” I pulled the straw out of the thick liquid and set it on the counter. Then I lifted the glass, tilted it and let a large glob of shake fill my mouth. Little flecks of fruit hit my taste buds; she’d used deep, dark cherries and the flavor was intoxicating. Her folks back in Michigan had shipped her a selection that included sour and sweet, Bing and yellow.
“Great stuff,” I said when I’d swallowed.
She rewarded me with a smile. “My very first date was at the Cherry Festival,” she recalled. “Bobby Anson was the only boy in school who was taller than me. He was skinny as a string, but he had an inch on me, so he asked me to the Festival and bought me a shake. A whole one just for me. I carried it around till it melted into mush, just so the other girls could see me with it and know I was on a real date. He kissed me on the Ferris wheel.”
Her big blue eyes had taken on a dreamy look. This was a Dorinda I’d seldom seen; by the time we met at Kent State, she’d been a full-blown hippie with long Indian skirts and flowers in her hair.
“Where is he now?” I asked.
“Lansing,” she replied. “At least that’s what my mom said. With a wife and three kids.”
“Do you ever wonder,” I began, “what your life would have been like if you—”
“Not really,” she said. She turned her back and began to fuss with the danishes she’d made with yellow cherries.
I wasn’t buying that. “Of course you do,” I persisted. “Everybody does. Don’t you think I wonder sometimes what my life would have been if I’d stayed in Ohio, gotten married, had kids, joined the PTA?”
“You’d have been miserable,” Dorinda said. “And what’s worse, your kids would have been, too. You’d have no outlet for your energy, your anger.”
“Do I really have that much anger?” I wasn’t sure I wanted to know.
Dorinda laughed. It was a nice laugh, a laugh that said she liked me and was going to keep on liking me no matter how she answered that question.
“The first time I met you, you were ranting about some injustice on campus. I don’t remember what it was, but I remember thinking you needed to mellow out, smoke a joint or something.”
“Yes,” I said, deliberately choosing a tone as sweet as Dorinda’s cherry shake. “As I recall, that was your all-purpose remedy for everything in those days. Hell, you thought the war would end if Nixon and Ho Chi Minh would just pass a doobie back and forth.”
“And you thought it would end if you marched on Washington enough times. We were both wrong.”
Yes, but I was righter, I wanted to say. Marching accomplished something. Marching told the country to stop and think it over. Marching was action. Smoking dope was passive, self-involved, self-indulgent.
Protesting, of course, was never self-indulgent.
Neither was anger.
My milkshake had melted into a sticky pink puddle. I pushed it away, suddenly sickened by its childish sweetness. “Got any more iced coffee?” I asked.
Dorinda walked toward the sun tea container where she kept the cold coffee. “Coffee,” she pronounced, “is a drink of anger.”
I gave this piece of wisdom some thought. “Anger is good for the blood,” I pronounced back. I could play Wise Woman as well as Dorinda. “Anger tones you, puts you on your mettle, makes you feel alive. Without anger, I’d be a blob. I’d have nothing but contentment, and, contrary to the belief of those of you who spent the sixties in a haze of marijuana smoke, contentment is not enough.”
“I may have to take it back,” my friend remarked.
“Take it back about what?”
“About Riordan. You and he may have been made for one an
other after all.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
“‘So what do you think of your blue-eyed boy now, Mr. Death?’” I tossed the words onto the table like a gauntlet and waited for the Grand Old Man of New York muckraking to pick them up.
He did. He saw my e. e. cummings and raised with Kenneth Rexroth.
“‘You killed him,’” he intoned, with a nod of his lion head. “‘You killed him in your Goddamned Brooks Brothers suit.’”
He heaved a sigh and let his gravel voice rumble on. “Only it wasn’t true about Dylan Thomas. Nobody, in or out of a Brooks Brothers suit, killed Thomas. He drank himself to death, and no amount of poetry can shift the blame to someone else. I met him once or twice, back in the old days, at the White Horse Tavern. He may have been the finest poet in the English language, but he was a mean, sloppy drunk. He died. Nobody killed him.”
“But somebody killed Eddie Fitz,” I reminded Winthrop. “Somebody iced him. My question to you is: By the time he died, was he still your blue-eyed boy? Did you still believe he was incorruptible?”
Another sigh. Jesse Winthrop seemed to be carrying a load as heavy as the one that burdened the statue of Atlas in Rockefeller Center. “No,” he said at last. He looked away, focusing on the huge cappuccino urn in the back of The Peacock. This time we didn’t have a coveted window table; we sat in the middle of the coffeehouse. At the table next to us, three first-year law students from nearby NYU argued about the Rule Against Perpetuities. I smiled in recognition, seeing my younger self as a passionate but deeply confused law student (any law student not confused by the Rule Against Perpetuities instantly became an expert in wills and trusts; the rest of us moved on to other specialties).
“No,” Winthrop went on, heaving another sigh, “those tapes you sent me of that drug dealer convinced me. But I still don’t approve,” he added, his tone sharpening, “of your client’s methods of dealing with witnesses he doesn’t like.”
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