Do I sound defensive?
I was about to explain it all to her but it bored even me by then so all I said was, “I do criminal law. I don’t get involved in…”
“What’s that?” she shouted as she leaped to kneeling on her seat. “What is it? What?”
I stared for a moment into her anxious face, filled with a true terror, before I looked under the table at where her legs had been only an instant before. A cat, brown and ruffled, was rubbing its back on the legs of her chair. It looked quite contented as it rubbed.
“It’s just a cat,” I said.
“Get rid of it.”
“It’s just a cat,” I repeated.
“I hate them, miserable ungrateful little manipulators, with their claws and their teeth and their fur-licking tongues. They eat human flesh, do you know that? It’s one of their favorite things. Faint near a cat and it’ll chew your face off.”
“I don’t think so.”
“Get rid of it, please please please.”
I reached under the table and the cat scurried away from my grasp. I stood up and went after it, herding it to the back of the coffee shop where, behind the bookshelves, was an open bathroom door. When the cat slipped into the bathroom I closed the door behind it.
“What was that all about?” I asked Caroline when I returned to the table.
“I don’t like cats,” she said as she fiddled with her cigarette.
“I don’t especially like cats either, but I don’t jump on my seat and go ballistic when I see one.”
“I have a little problem with them, that’s all.”
“With cats?”
“I’m afraid of cats. I’m not the only one. It has a name. Ailurophobia. So what? We’re all afraid of something.”
I thought on that a bit. She was right of course, we were all afraid of something, and in the scheme of things being afraid of cats was not the worst of fears. My great fear in this life didn’t have a name that I knew of. I was afraid of remaining exactly who I was, and that phobia instilled a shiver of fear into every one of my days. Something as simple as a fear of cats would have been a blessing.
“All right, Caroline,” I said. “Tell me about your sister.”
She took a drag from her cigarette and exhaled in a long white stream. “Well, for one thing, she was murdered.”
“Have the police found the killer?”
She reached for her pack of Camel Lights even though the cigarette she had was still lit. “Jackie was hanging from the end of a rope in her apartment. They’ve concluded that she hung herself.”
“The police said that?”
“That’s right. The coroner and some troglodyte detective named McDeiss. They closed the case, said it was a suicide. But she didn’t.”
“Hang herself?”
“She wouldn’t.”
“Detective McDeiss ruled it a suicide?”
She sighed. “You don’t believe me either.”
“No, actually,” I said. “I’ve had a few run-ins with McDeiss but he’s a pretty good cop. If he said it was a suicide, it’s a fair bet your sister killed herself. You may not have thought she was suicidal, that’s perfectly natural, but…”
“Of course she was suicidal,” she said, interrupting me once again. “Jackie read Sylvia Plath as if her poetry were some sort of a road map through adolescence. One of her favorite lines was from a poem called ‘Lady Lazarus.’ ‘Dying is an art, like everything else. I do it exceptionally well.’ ”
“Then I don’t understand your problem.”
“Jackie talked of suicide as naturally as others talked of the weather, but she said she’d never hang herself. She was disgusted by the idea of dangling there, aware of the pain, turning as the rope tightened and creaked, the pressure on your neck, on your backbone, hanging there until they cut you down.”
“What would have been her way?”
“Pills. Darvon. Two thousand milligrams is fatal. She always had six thousand on hand. Jackie used to joke that she wanted to be prepared if ever a really terrific suicidal urge came along. Besides, in her last couple years she almost seemed happy. It was like she was actually finding the peacefulness she once thought was only for her in death through this New Age church she had joined, finding it through meditation. She had even gotten herself engaged, to an idiot, yes, but still engaged.”
“So let’s say she was murdered. What do you want me to do about it?”
“Find out who did it.”
“I’m just a lawyer,” I said. “What you’re looking for is a private investigator. Now I have one that I use who is terrific. His name is Morris Kapustin and he’s a bit unorthodox, but if anyone can help he can. I can set…”
“I don’t want him, I want you.”
“Why me?”
“What exactly do mob lawyers do, anyway, eat in Italian restaurants and plot?”
“Why me, Caroline?” I stared at her and waited.
She lit her new cigarette from the still-glowing butt of her old one and then crushed the old against the edge of the mug. “Do you think I smoke too much? Everybody thinks I smoke too much. I used to be cool, now it’s like I’m a leper. Old ladies stop me in the street and lecture.”
I just stared at her and waited some more and after all the waiting she took a deep drag from her cigarette, exhaled, and said:
“I think a bookie named Jimmy Vigs killed her.”
So that was it, why she had chased me, insignificant me, down the street and pulled a gun and collapsed to the cement in black tears, all of which was perfectly designed to gain my attention, if not my sympathy. I knew Jimmy Vigs Dubinsky, sure I did. I had represented him on his last bookmaking charge and gotten him an acquittal too, when I denied he was a gambler, denied it was his ledger that the cops had found, denied it was his handwriting in the ledger despite what the experts said because wink-wink what do experts know, denied the notes in the ledger referred to bets on football games, denied the units mentioned in the ledger notes referred to dollar amounts, and then, after all those sweet denials, I had opened my arms and said with my best boys-will-be-boys voice, “And where’s the harm?” It helped that the jury was all men, after I had booted all the women, and that the trial was held in the spring, smack in the middle of March madness, when every one of those men had money in an NCAA pool. So, yes, I knew Jimmy Vigs Dubinsky.
“He’s a sometime client, as you obviously know,” I said, “so I really don’t want to hear anymore. But what I can tell you about Jim Dubinsky is that he’s not a killer. I’ve known him for…”
“Then you can clear him.”
“Will you stop interrupting me? It’s rude and annoying.”
She tilted her head at me and smiled, as if provoking me was her intent.
“I don’t need to clear Jimmy,” I said. “He’s not a suspect since the cops ruled your sister’s death a suicide.”
“I suspect him and I have a gun.”
I pursed my lips. “And you’ll kill him if I don’t take the case, is that it?”
“I’m a desperate woman, Mr. Carl,” she said, and there was just the right touch of husky fear in her voice, as if she had prepared the line in advance, repeated it to the mirror over and over until she got it just right.
“Let me guess, just a wild hunch of mine, but before you started playing around with f-stops and film speeds, did you happen to take a stab at acting?”
She smiled. “For a few years, yes. I was actually starring in a film until the financing was pulled.”
“And that point the gun, ‘Oh-my-God,’ collapse into a sobbing heap on the sidewalk thing, that was just part of an act?”
Her smile broadened and there was something sly and inviting in it. “I need your help.”
“You made the right decision giving up on the dramatics.” I thought for a moment that it might be entertaining to see her go up against Jimmy Vigs with her pop gun, but then thought better of it. And I did like that smile of hers, at least enough to liste
n. “All right, Caroline, tell me why you think my friend Jimmy killed your sister.”
She sighed and inhaled and sprayed a cloud of smoke into the air above my face. “It’s my brother Eddie,” she said. “He has a gambling problem. He bets too much and he loses too often. From what I understand, he is into this Jimmy Vigs person for a lot of money, too much money. There were threatening calls, there were late-night visits, Eddie’s car was vandalized. One of Eddie’s arms was broken, in a fall, he said, but no one believed him. Then Jackie died, in what seemed like a suicide but which I know wasn’t, and suddenly the threats stopped, the visits were finished, and Eddie’s repaired and repainted car maintained its pristine condition. The bookie must have been paid off. If this Jimmy Vigs person had killed Eddie he would have lost everything, but he killed Jackie and that must have scared Eddie into digging up the money and paying. But I heard he’s betting again, raising his debt even farther. And if your Jimmy Vigs needs to scare Eddie again I’m the one he’ll go after next.”
I listened to her, nodding all the while, not believing a word of it. If Jimmy was stiffed he’d threaten, sure, who wouldn’t, and maybe break a leg or two, which could be quite painful when done correctly, but that was as far as it would go. Unless, maybe, we were talking big big bucks, but it didn’t seem likely that Jim would let it get that high with someone like this girl’s brother.
“So what I want,” she said, “is for you to find out who killed her and get them to stay away from me. I thought with your connections to this Jimmy Vigs and the mob it would be easy for you.”
“I bet you did,” I said. “But what if it wasn’t Jimmy Vigs?”
“He did it.”
“Most victims are killed by someone they know. If she was murdered, maybe it was by a lover or a family member?”
“My family had nothing to do with it,” she said sharply.
“Jimmy Dubinsky is not a murderer. The mere fact that your brother owed him money is…”
“Then what about this?” she said while she reached into her handbag.
“You did it again, dammit. And I wish you wouldn’t keep putting your hand in there.”
“Frightened?” She smiled as she pulled out a plastic sandwich bag and dangled it before me.
I took the bag from her and examined it. Inside was a piece of cellophane, a candy wrapper, one end twisted, the other opened and the word “Tosca’s” printed on one side. When I saw the printing my throat closed on me.
“I found this lying on her bathroom floor, behind the toilet, when I was cleaning out her apartment,” she said.
“So she had been to Tosca’s. So what?”
“Jackie was an obsessive cleaner. She wouldn’t have just left this lying about. The cops missed it, I guess they don’t do toilets, but Jackie surely wouldn’t have left it there. And tomato sauce was too acidic for her stomach. She never ate Italian food.”
“Then someone else, maybe.”
“Exactly. I asked around and Tosca’s seems to be some sort of mob hangout.”
“So they say.”
“I think she was murdered, Mr. Carl, and that the murderer had been to Tosca’s and left this and I think you’re the one who can find out for me.”
I looked at the wrapper and then at Caroline and then back at the wrapper. Maybe I had underestimated the viciousness of Jimmy Vigs Dubinsky, and maybe one of my clients, in collecting for my other client, had left this little calling card from Tosca’s at the murder scene.
“And if I find out who did it,” I said, “then what?”
“I just want them to leave me alone. If you find out who did it, could you get them to leave me alone?”
“Maybe,” I said. “What about the cops?”
“That will be up to you,” she said.
I didn’t like the idea of this waif rummaging through Tosca’s looking for trouble and I figured Enrico Raffaello wouldn’t like it much either. If I took the retainer and proved to her, somehow, that her sister actually killed herself, I could save everyone, especially Caroline, a lot of trouble. I took another look at the wrapper in that plastic bag, wondered whose fingerprints might still be found there, and then stuffed it into my jacket pocket where it could do no harm.
“I’ll need a retainer of ten thousand dollars,” I said.
She smiled, not with gratitude but with victory, as if she knew all along I’d take the case. “I thought it was five thousand.”
“I charge one eighty-five an hour plus expenses.”
“That seems very high.”
“That’s my price. And you have to promise to throw that gun away.”
She pressed her lips together and thought about it for a moment. “But I want to keep the gun,” she said, with a slight pout in her voice. “It keeps me warm.”
“Buy a dog.”
She thought some more and then reached into her handbag once again and this time what she pulled out was a checkbook, opening it with the practiced air you see in well-dressed women at grocery stores. “Who should I make it out to?”
“Derringer and Carl,” I said. “Ten thousand dollars.”
“I remember the amount,” she said with a laugh as she wrote.
“Is this going to clear?”
She ripped the check from her book and handed it to me. “I hope so.”
“Hopes have never paid my rent. When it clears I’ll start to work.” I looked the check over. It was drawn on the First Mercantile Bank of the Main Line. “Nice bank,” I said.
“They gave me a toaster.”
“And you’ll get rid of the gun?”
“I’ll get rid of the gun.”
So that was that. I took her number and stuffed the check into my pocket and left her there with a cigarette smoldering between her fingers. I had been retained, sort of, assuming the check cleared, to investigate the mysterious death of Jacqueline Shaw. I had expected it would be a simple case of checking the files and finding a suicide. I didn’t know then, couldn’t possibly have known, all the crimes and all the hells through which that investigation would lead. But just then, with that check in my hand, I wasn’t thinking so much about poor Jacqueline Shaw hanging by her neck from a rope, but instead about Caroline, her sister, and the slyness of her smile.
I took the subway back to Sixteenth Street and walked the rest of the way to my office on Twenty-first. Up the stairs, past the lists of names, through the hallway with all the other offices with which we shared our space, to the three doorways in the rear.
“Any messages, Ellie?” I asked my secretary. She was a young blonde woman with freckles, our most loyal employee as she was our only employee.
She handed me a pile of slips. “Nothing exciting.”
“Is there ever?” I said as I nodded sadly and went into my scuff of an office. Marked white walls, files piled in lilting towers, dead flowers drooping like desiccated corpses from a glass vase atop my big brown filing cabinet. Through the single window was a sad view of the decrepit alleyway below. I unlocked the file cabinet and dropped the plastic bag with the Tosca’s candy wrapper inside into a file marked “Recent Court Decisions.” I closed the drawer and pushed in the cabinet lock and sat at my desk, staring at all the work I needed to do, transcripts to review, briefs to write, discovery to discover. Instead of getting down to work I took the check out of my pocket. Ten thousand dollars. Caroline Shaw. First Mercantile Bank of the Main Line. That was a pretty fancy banking address for a punkette with a post in her nose. I stood and strolled into my partner’s office.
She was at her desk, chewing, a pen in one hand and a carrot in the other. Gray-and-white-streaked copies of case opinions, paragraphs highlighted in fluorescent pink, were scattered across her desktop and she stared up at me as if I were a rude interruption.
“What’s up, doc?” Beth Derringer said.
“Want to go for a ride?”
“Sure,” she said as she snapped a chunk of carrot with her teeth. “What for?”
“Credit chec
k.”
4
“WHERE ARE WE OFF TO?” asked Beth, sitting in the passenger seat of my little Mazda as I negotiated the wilds of the Schuylkill Expressway.
Short and sharp-faced, with glossy black hair ct even and fierce, Elizabeth Derringer had been my partner since we both fell out of law school, all except for one short period a few years back when I lost my way in a case, choosing money over honor, and she felt compelled to resign. That was very much like Beth, to pretend that integrity counted for more than cash, and of all the people I ever met in my life who pretended just that same thing, and there have been far too many, she was the best at pulling it off. Beth was smarter than me, wiser than me, a better lawyer all around, but she had an annoying tendency to pursue causes rather then currency, representing cripples thrown off SSI disability rolls, secretaries whose nipples had been tweaked by Neanderthal superiors, deadbeats looking to stave off foreclosure of the family homestead. It was my criminal work that kept us solvent, but I liked to think that Beth’s unprofitable good deeds justified my profitable descent into the mire with my bad boy clients. In today’s predatory legal world I would have been well advised to jettison her income drag, except I never would. I knew I could trust Beth more deeply than I could trust anyone else in this world, which was not a bad recipe, actually, for a partner and which explained why I hitched my shingle to hers but not why she hitched hers to mine. That I still hadn’t figured out.
“I found us a new client,” I said. “I want to see if the retainer check clears.”
“You smell like a chimney.”
“This new client is a bit nervous.”
“Why don’t you just have Morris do a background check for you?” she said, referring to Morris Kapustin, our usual private detective.
Bitter Truth Page 3