“My husband’s lawyer wouldn’t let them do that to you.”
“Oh yeah, right.” There’s not much bite left in his voice. “Look, I’m sorry, I just can’t handle any more pressure right now,” he says, rattling the pills in his pocket. “I wouldn’t be much of a witness anyway.”
“What makes you say that?”
“Because look at me. Who’s gonna believe me? I’m not a person anymore.”
She takes a moment to look him over. He’s certainly more presentable than he was that first day he came into her office. His beard is shaved and his hair is shorter, though it’s thin and graying in places. Understandable for the life he’s been leading.
“I’m looking at you. You look great.”
Oh, the shame! Trying to manipulate a mental patient by flirting. He half smiles to accept the compliment and then shakes his head, rejecting it.
“Nah. You’re good,” he says. “But you’re not that good.”
“But I mean it.” She takes another step toward him. “You’re a hundred times better than the last time I saw you. Seriously. You’re working. The people at the shelter say you have your own room and you’re earning money. In a few months, they say, you might even be able to go out on your own.”
“But none of it counts.”
“Why not?”
“It just doesn’t. I’m faking it.”
“Faking what? You’re alive.”
“Yeah, I’m alive, but I’m one of those people who might as well be dead. You know? I had my chance to be happy,” he says. “I had Margo and I had Shar and I lost both of them. God doesn’t give you two more chances like that.”
“I just don’t know how you can be so certain about that.”
She senses that he wants to testify, he wants to do the right thing. But something’s holding him back.
“No, it’s no good.” He shakes his head convulsively, denying everything. “I’ve fallen too far. I’ve done too much bad shit. I’m not a person anymore. God won’t forgive me.”
“Forgive you for what?”
“You wouldn’t understand.”
Dana feels as if she’s trying to pry open a sleeping man’s eyelids. But how’s she going to do it? He could go either way.
She needs to give him a reason to help her out.
“Listen, can I tell you something?” She arches her neck and touches her throat with her fingers, trying to figure out how to begin.
“What?”
She flips through her mental files, trying to come up with something that will have meaning for him. Don’t lose him. Don’t let him slip away. But she’s just a nice Catholic girl from Connecticut. What’s she going to tell a man who’s been living on the street, smoking crack, and eating out of garbage cans for so long?
She lunges at a memory, hoping it will jar him.
“You just made me think of this thing that happened when I started at the hospital,” she says quickly. “My supervisor suggested I go on a few runs with the ambulance crew.”
“Yeah? So?” John bangs the hammer against his left leg.
Keep going. Don’t lose him.
“So we went on a run to a fire in Chelsea and there was this one body that looked like part of the wreckage. You just looked at it and you felt sick. But then we realized it was still breathing. So the technician bent down and said, ‘Are you a man or a woman?’ Because it makes a difference in how they treat them. And this thing that didn’t have any eyelids anymore just looked up and said, ‘I’m a man. Can’t you tell? I’m still a man.’ ”
“So what’s that got to do with me?” asks John G., half curious but trying not to show it.
“That if he could still somehow hang on and say he was a man after what he’d been through, so could you.”
Pause. Did she get through to him?
“Easy for you to say.” He swings his hammer at a beam of light coming through the sooty window.
“Well, think about it.”
He puts the hammer down and faces her. All at once, Dana knows she’s reached him. Maybe he found something in the story or maybe he was just looking for an excuse to say yes. But then his eyes meet hers and for a second, she has the uncanny and uncomfortable feeling that he’s about to ask her for something she doesn’t want to give.
She starts to panic, wondering how far she’ll have to go to save her family. But then he drops his eyes and looks away, like the shy boy who used to stare at her in geometry class.
“Yeah, I’ll think about it,” he says. “Maybe you ought to tell me what day they want me in court. Just in case.”
“Thank you.” She reaches out and touches his hand.
He quivers a little and there’s a loud crash from downstairs as if part of the building’s foundations have just collapsed.
“By the way.” John G. turns back to finish off the wall. “Did that guy in the fire live?”
Dana hesitates only for a moment before she decides to tell him the truth. “No,” she says. “He didn’t.”
72
I said, what the hell are you doing here?” Philip looks around the Alpha Bar.
“Just asking some questions.”
Jake glances over his shoulder. The two old men who’d been sitting in the corner are gone. The scotch left in one of their glasses undulates slightly.
“Why don’t you leave decent people alone and mind your own business?” Philip’s face tightens like a fist.
“I have a court case I’m working on,” Jake says evenly. “I have some information I’d like to get from Miss Perrara.”
“And she doesn’t want to talk to you.”
“I didn’t hear her say that.”
“You hear me saying it, don’t you?” Philip raises his right hand as if he’s about to give Jake a slap.
The charms on Perrara’s necklace make that tinkling sound again. Jake looks over at her and suddenly things start to seem more involved. Philip isn’t just talking. He broke six bones in this poor woman’s face. He crushed a man’s skull with a baseball bat. He forced a crowbar up another man’s anus. This is a human being who gets something out of hurting other people.
“If you got a problem with me, you keep it that way,” Philip says, leaning over the bar and pointing a finger at Jake. “Don’t go bringing other people into it. Or else the people you’re close to might get brought into it.”
“You threatening my family, Philip?”
“It’s not a threat. It’s a prediction. Shit happens.”
Smart. Stopping just short of an actual threat.
“I still think Miss Perrara can make up her own mind whether she wants to talk to me.” Jake puts his business card down on the bar counter.
Instead of looking at it, though, Isabel Perrara turns to Philip and puts an arm around him. The torturer and the tortured. What do you expect? She owes him her job.
Philip smiles and fingers the charms on her necklace. “So now you got your answer,” he says.
73
I really don’t understand this case,” says Judge Henry Frankenthaler, looking from Jake and his lawyers to the two young prosecutors. “I mean, what do we have here? One nut testifying against another.”
They’re sitting in his chambers during a break from another tedious buy-and-bust case a week before Jake’s trial is supposed to begin. There’s a spectacular color photo spread of the Brooklyn Bridge hanging above Frankenthaler’s grayish Brylcreemed head, which used to be covered with unkempt curly brown defense lawyer’s hair.
Just to his left is a black-and-white picture of Henry in a tux, a swarthy bear laughing and shaking hands with the governor and the county chairman who helped him get nominated for the bench. In the background, there’s an orchestra and women in long dresses on the dance floor, looking impatient. A networking dinner. A schmoozefest. The pretext was probably a wedding or a bar mitzvah, but the real event was going on at some side table or banquette, where favors were being traded, posteriors were being kissed, and careers were bei
ng made and broken. This was the type of meal that could change your life; a move-’em-in, move-’em-out defense lawyer like Henry could rise to the office of distinguished jurist over hors d’oeuvres. The kind of event, in other words, where Jake will no longer be welcome once this case is done.
He’s already tried to get Susan to put it on the record that Philip threatened him in Little Italy the other day, but the prosecutors shot it down, saying that he’d come to the bar to question the witness and no direct intimidation was involved.
“I mean, we’re just talking here, right?” says the judge, looking at Francis X. O’Connell and Joan Fusco, the two AD As.
“Of course,” says Francis, ever eager to please a man in a black robe.
“I don’t understand why the DA even brought this case,” says Frankenthaler. “You have the word of two accomplices, this Cardi and his cousin, and then you got this character Taylor who’s been in and out of jail all his life and is currently living in a railway tunnel. It’s cockamamy. That’s the only word I can think of.”
“The grand jury didn’t think so,” pouts Ms. Fusco.
“I could get a grand jury to indict my dog if I was DA,” says the judge.
Jake feels a surge of hope. Maybe this case will get dismissed after all. But then he remembers that Henry used to bluster on in court this way before dashing out into the hall to cut some pathetic deal for his client.
Sure enough, Frankenthaler turns toward Susan like a cobra sizing up a chubby mongoose.
“And Miss Hoffman,” he says “I must say I’m somewhat disappointed in you. The best witness you can put forward is this John Gates? I see from the record he’s been on Rikers for a drug charge as well as being arrested recently and hospitalized for his hallucinations.”
“Isolated episodes,” says Susan, keeping an even tone and graciously not pointing out she’d beaten Henry with far weaker cases when she was a prosecutor. “In any event, he’s no less reliable than their witness. We’re prepared to present expert testimony from the head of the psychiatric department of NYU Hospital that Mr. Gates is capable of remembering what happened that night.”
“And we have an expert of our own who will disagree,” says Francis.
“Fine. So it’s dueling fruitcakes.” The judge, exasperated, looks down at the case file. “How’s a jury going to make a qualitative judgment about the credibility of their testimony? I don’t want to turn my courtroom into cloud-cuckoo-land.”
“With all due respect, Your Honor,” Ms. Fusco interrupts. “How many cases have you tried where it was one drug dealer testifying against another? I think juries are sophisticated enough to understand that choirboys are rarely present at the commission of a major crime.”
The judge nods and sighs. “Point taken,” he says. “It’s a crime committed in a railway tunnel. Who else is going to see it except someone who lives underground?”
“Exactly, exactly,” says Ms. Fusco, with a trace of a Belt Parkway accent pushing through her overbite.
Jake’s stomach clenches. This is what his life has become. Gloom, accusations, and the taste of ashes in his mouth. There’s no solace in knowing the DA recently decided not to seek the death penalty against him. He still has a vision of himself stumbling out the front gate of some prison after twenty years and seeing Dana, worn out and frayed: her hair gray, her face lined, her mouth hard and bitter from waiting for him. He sees Alex, grown and unrecognizable, with children of his own about to reach their teens. Grandchildren who’ll never acknowledge him. A lonely and bleak old age stretching out before him.
“Tell you what I’m going to do,” says the judge. “I always tell my wife I like to get to the movies in time for the previews because they’re often more interesting than the film that follows. So I’d like to arrange for a preview here. Just to avoid a circus.”
Jake notices that since ascending to the bench Henry has started speaking even more often in sculpted, portentous tones instead of the peppery banter of a defense lawyer. More Park Avenue and less West Islip. The judge presses a button and has one of the exhausted-looking young men who clerk for him bring in his calendar.
“I want to bring both of these gentlemen in for a Wade hearing,” Frankenthaler says. “Make sure both of them are able to identify the defendant. I have a spot open on my calendar for Friday. And then we can start the actual trial on Monday as scheduled.”
Jake hears a rustle of nylon and sees Ms. Fusco whispering nervously to Francis.
“Your Honor,” says Francis. “We seem to have temporarily lost track of our witness, Mr. Taylor. We might need the weekend to get in touch with him. He moves around a lot.”
“Then I suggest you find him a fixed abode,” says Frankenthaler, going high church again. “Otherwise I’ll be forced to reconsider Miss Hoffman’s motion to dismiss.” He shifts his eyes to look at Susan. “And I expect you to have your witness here too. There are two sides to this. Have both of them take their medication, and may the best prescription win.”
74
I don’t like this business with you threatening people,” Ms. Fusco tells Philip.
They’re sitting in a $15-an-hour room at a motel near the Bronx Zoo. The walls are thin and the mattress on the double bed is light and spongy.
“Who threatened anyone?” says Philip, sitting at the foot of the bed. “Jake came into a bar to talk to a friend of mine. I was there. I told him to mind his manners. My friend didn’t want to talk to him. End of story.”
“I still don’t like it.” Ms. Fusco stands across the room, wearing a preppy herringbone jacket and nibbling on one of her bloody cuticles. He notices her hair is in a ponytail today.
“I want you to stay away from the Schiffs.”
“Hey.” Philip shoots his arm out. “If they have a problem, it won’t be with me.”
“And another thing,” says Ms. Fusco. “The DA wants to know when he’s going to see some production out of you investigating your uncle.”
“Jesus Christ, one thing at a time.” Philip holds up his hands, like she has him against the ropes. “I thought we were going to finish this case against Jake before we started concentrating on my uncle.”
Another delaying tactic. Philip figures that Carmine is almost seventy. If he can drag his feet and draw things out long enough, Carmine will be dead by the time the investigation wraps up and they turn in the court papers. He’ll die never knowing his nephew was an informant.
“What do you want me to do?” Philip asks Ms. Fusco. “Start wearing a wire right away and asking him, ‘Do you remember?’ all the time? You think my uncle’s an idiot?”
She studies his face for a moment, not quite satisfied.
“All right, let’s get back to the Schiff case,” she says. But her eyes are still fixed on a point somewhere behind him. “The trial begins on Monday. We don’t want any mistakes from here on in.”
“I’m not making any mistakes.”
She takes the rubber band off her ponytail. “And we want to make sure we’re all clear on your plea agreement. You’ve told us about everything you’ve done before. Right? We’re not going to learn about any other crimes you’ve committed.”
“Absolutely not.”
He’s not going to tell her about Isabel now. That would bring the whole roof down. The prosecutors would come around the Alpha Bar asking questions, and then Carmine would get nervous, and before you knew it Philip would be admiring the view from inside the trunk of a Chrysler.
Ms. Fusco shakes out her hair. “You’re also aware that any discrepancies between your grand jury testimony and your trial testimony will lead to us revoking your plea agreement, right?”
“Sure. You don’t have to keep telling me.”
She pulls back the musty green drapes and looks out at the parking lot. “We just want to make sure you’re not jerking us off.”
From the next room, he can hear bedsprings squeaking and the mechanical groaning of a thoroughly professional Fordham Road prostitute d
oing her job.
“I don’t jerk anybody off unless they want me to,” Philip says.
Ms. Fusco lets out a deep breath. For a moment, Philip thinks she’s going to come over and slap him.
Instead, there’s a knock at the door and she goes over to open it. The pudgy Hispanic detective who’d been sitting in the red Chevy outside comes in wearing a porkpie hat and a mustard sports jacket. The Irish wooden Indian is nowhere in sight today. Maybe he had a fight with Ms. Fusco, Philip thinks.
She says something to the new detective in rapid-fire Spanish. He mutters an answer and gives Philip a sidelong glance that puts a chill in his belly. Then he heads back out to the parking lot.
“Did he say something about me being American?” Philip asks.
“No, why?”
“I thought I heard him say the word ‘American.’ ”
“No, that wasn’t the word he used.” She pulls back the drapes and watches the detective walking back through the snow to his car.
“Well, what did he say then?”
“It’s not important.” She puts her nails up to her mouth again but then thinks better of biting them.
“Come on, tell me.”
“It was nothing.”
Something inside him begins to vibrate. From the next room, the bedsprings are getting louder.
“If it’s nothing, you can tell me.”
“All right. He called you a maricon. Are you happy?” she says with harsh impatience.
“What?”
“I told him I was a little nervous being alone in the room with you and he said I shouldn’t worry about it because you were a maricon.”
“He called me a maricon’? He called me a faggot? You know what happens to people who call me that?”
“No. What?”
The bedsprings in the next room sound like they’re about to snap.
“Never mind.” Philip catches himself. “Why the hell did he say a thing like that?”
“He talked to your old cell mate from prison.”
Philip’s arm flings out involuntarily again. He has a sudden urge to walk across the room and hurt her.
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