All right, it was all speculation. Bruce admitted that, even if he was not prepared to admit what Marlon Thackery insisted—that his continued concentration on Lemaster Carlyle smacked of a vendetta. He was not seeking to vindicate his parents—so Bruce insisted—and was not driven by his resentment of the elite of African America. No. All he was trying to do was discover what happened to Kellen Zant.
Fortified by his reaffirmed certainty, Bruce once more opened Jeremy Flew’s personnel file, and that was when the receptionist buzzed to say that Gayle was on the phone.
Bruce knew Gayle in the casual way that senior cops always tended to know the top criminal lawyers in town. Mutual admiration between a longtime detective and an attorney who represented with considerable success many of those he arrested was not possible, but, certainly, he recognized both the quality of Gayle’s mind and the seriousness of her purpose. She had never been one to waste other people’s time.
So he took the call.
“A client of mine wants to talk to you, this morning if possible,” the lawyer said. “I have to warn you, it’s a little bit tricky, because he’s currently awaiting trial.”
Kwame Kennerly, he guessed, because the radio personality was constantly being arrested for protesting this or that. “About what?”
A moment’s hesitation, as if, even now, Gayle Gittelman wished her client would make a different choice. “He asked me to tell you that he has information about what really happened to Kellen Zant.”
“Why isn’t he trading with the state’s attorney?”
“If he tells you, be sure to let me know.”
Then Gayle told him her client’s name, and Bruce reached for his jacket.
(II)
ANTHONY TICE WAS GOING to tell Bruce as little as possible, and seemed delighted at the prospect. He was, in Bruce’s mind, the opposite of Gayle Gittelman, an opponent for whom he harbored neither respect nor admiration. Tony had always been the sort of attorney who could not cite client privilege without a small chuckle, for he was not so much asserting a solemn duty as drawing the winning ace from his sleeve. “You know how it works, Bruce,” said the attorney, using first names because he pretended to be everyone’s friend when he was really very much the opposite. “I couldn’t stay in business if I passed around my clients’ confidences. I wouldn’t have any clients. I’d be disbarred,” he concluded proudly. “You understand, Bruce. I’ve checked you out. I know your background.”
Bruce nodded to say he indeed understood. They faced each other across a conference table in Gayle Gittelman’s office. Gayle herself was absent. “Is that why you asked to see me?” His face was stone. “You’re asking me to help you get out of your current mess?”
“No, no, no, nothing like that.” The white teeth gleamed in a thick, enticing smile. “I know this kind of frame-up, and I know how to handle it.”
“By harassing Julia Carlyle?” Because Lemaster had been on the phone to Bruce just hours after the episode, demanding that he warn the man off once and for all. The university president had been so angry that Bruce had half expected him to ask if anyone would rid him of this troublesome lawyer, or however it went. “That struck me as a very panicky thing to do, Tony. You must be in serious trouble.”
“Why would you say that?”
“First you’re arrested. Then you bother Mrs. Carlyle. Now you want my help. Sounds to me like desperation.”
“The reason I was arrested,” said the lawyer indignantly, “is that I was making too much progress. I was getting a little too close to finding what Kellen had hidden.”
The lawyer laid his hands on the table, wrists close together as if waiting for the cuffs. Bruce wondered whether Tricky Tony was really so confident of his ability to beat the rap. The clever eyes flicked across Bruce’s hard face. Bruce had arrested all kinds: the ones you knew could never do the time, the ones you suspected would find God on the other side of the bars, and the ones who would spend their whole sentences plotting revenge, emerging at the end even more evil than when they went in.
Anthony Tice he placed in the last category.
“If you say so,” said Bruce after a moment.
A feral grin. “Now, Bruce, I know what you think of me. I know what everybody thinks of me. Of my…clientele. But that’s why Kellen came to my door. Because of the clientele that everybody hates.”
Bruce nodded and said nothing. In his experience, when a man wanted to confess, he confessed, not just to an interrogator, but to whoever happened along: bartender, girlfriend, stranger on a train.
“Kellen had in his possession something of great value and wanted to know what a certain client of mine would bid for it. I talked to my clients, who thought it over and asked for proof. Kellen gave them what he called a teaser. A page from a certain diary. Well, my clients were impressed. There was a little bargaining, some back-and-forth, and at last a deal was struck. I was not a party to the deal, Bruce. I was only the broker. Naturally, a broker takes a cut.”
“Naturally.”
Tony frowned but could evidently find no insult in the tone. Bruce wondered if he was the sort of powerful white man who minded being interrogated by a black one. But it was the lawyer who had extended the invitation.
“The trouble began,” Tice resumed, “when my clients came to me and said they’d heard from certain friends that Kellen was offering to sell to others the same item he’d agreed to sell to them. My clients are patient men, Bruce, but this naturally annoyed them. They met me, told me to remind Zant that they had a deal. They don’t like welshers, my clients.”
“So you met with him. Kellen Zant.”
“I met with him. And he laughed in my face. He said there was going to be an auction, and my clients could bid along with everybody else. I told him they don’t do that. He said in that case he would find another buyer. He had one coming into town the next day, and they might just make a deal.”
Bruce rolled a pencil back and forth on the table, for he had found that drawing the suspect’s focus often aided the urge to talk. So did a good hard slap in the face, so he said, not looking up, “Did your clients kill him? Or did their lawyer do it for them?”
“My clients had no reason to hurt Kellen. Neither did I. They wanted what he was selling.”
But it occurred to Bruce that the lawyer was being too clever, that the story he told was too easy. Kellen Zant was no fool. He would not have made a deal with men like the ones Tice represented only to break it for a profit. Tice’s clients had rather unpleasant ways of exacting damages for breach. More likely, Tricky Tony had told his clients that a deal had been reached before Zant had agreed. Maybe the lawyer had already taken his cut. No wonder he was worried.
“Your clients must be getting desperate, too,” Bruce said.
“My clients are not men who get desperate.” Looking down at his hands. “They’re men who make other men desperate.”
“And are you desperate? Is that why you called me?”
“You have to understand the way my clients think, Bruce. They set themselves an objective and head straight toward it. Very military. Very organized. Very mission-driven. Your kind of people, Bruce.” The cockiness was returning. “I think maybe you could help them.”
“You’re joking.”
“The thing is, Bruce, so far I’ve persuaded them to hang back. Not to do anything directly, just to wait and let events shape themselves. Like I said, they’re patient men. But they won’t hang back forever. Sooner or later, if there aren’t any concrete results, they might decide to take more active measures. And they’re not the kind of people who will be deterred by such trivialities as who gets hurt along the way.”
“They sound like a fun bunch.”
“They’re not. I assure you.”
Bruce rolled his shoulders and had the satisfaction of watching the lawyer shrink away. “Why don’t you tell me the rest?”
“The rest?”
“Zant told you he had another buyer coming into to
wn the next day. That would be Cameron Knowland, I’m betting. Knowland and Zant were supposed to have breakfast on Saturday, but Zant got shot on Friday night. That means you saw Zant the night he died. That’s when you had your argument. And that’s why you’re so worried. It’s not just your clients you’re worried about. It’s the police, the actual police. Until the investigation got shut down, you were scared they would hear that the two of you were together that night and pin the crime on you.”
“They’d never convict me. I didn’t do it.”
“Maybe not. But the arrest would ruin you.” He folded his huge hands where Tice could see them. “So tell me the rest, Tony. Tell me what happened the night Zant died.”
And so the lawyer did.
(III)
IT HAD SEEMED SO SIMPLE, said Tice. He called Zant at his office on Friday afternoon, and Zant agreed to meet him at five-thirty in the parking lot outside Hilliman Tower. He was a few minutes late, but he brought along another teaser. Another diary page, said Tony, where somebody had scribbled that the guard at the beach had developed a sudden case of I-can’t-remember-itis. There was a lot of money floating around town, the unknown author had written, and then the page ended. Tony took the teaser but explained his clients’ position nevertheless. Kellen, as Bruce had suspected, denied having made a deal. Tony said his clients wouldn’t like that very much. Kellen thought it over, then told the lawyer to meet him back in this same parking lot in two hours—that is, at half past seven. Then he got into his own car and drove away.
“But you followed him.”
“I tried to. There was a lot of traffic because of the hockey game. I don’t know the campus that well. He turned into some alley, and when I got there he was gone.”
So Tony hung around, cruising the area, hoping to spot the car. Twice his clients called to demand a progress report, and twice he assured them that he was working on it. By seven-fifteen, he was back in the parking lot, and the Audi was there. It was covered with a fair dusting of snow from the storm, and Tice realized he had been had. The economist must have circled the block, knowing he was being followed, and swung back into the parking lot, the last place Tony would look. So the lawyer sat in his car, watching both the Audi and the entrance to Hilliman Tower, and at seven-forty-five Zant knocked on the window of his car, surprising him. He had come up the other way.
“Which other way?”
“Downhill. I don’t know. The arts center, the div school, lots of buildings are down there.”
Zant told Tony to come for a ride. The lawyer climbed into the Audi, and they drove out to Tyler’s Landing. Tice kept asking where they were going, and the economist kept saying not to worry, he just wanted to show him something. They hit Main Street around eight-fifteen, and that was when Zant’s cell phone rang. He parked and told the lawyer to wait, then stepped out of the car to take the call. He was angry or upset. He did a lot of yelling. Even from inside, Tice could hear snatches. At one point Zant shouted, You can’t do that. Finally, he said, No, I’m in town, I’ll come to you.
Then, visibly shaking, Zant opened the door and told the lawyer to get out. There had been a change of plans, he said. He pointed to Greta’s Tavern, across the street. You should go in there and get a cup of coffee or something. If I’m not back in an hour, call yourself a cab and forget tonight ever happened. Zant never came back, and the lawyer called a taxi.
“Did he say where he was going?”
“No.”
“Or who was on the phone?”
“No.”
“And you didn’t tell the police any of this?”
He shook his head. “They never talked to me.”
“But you talked to your clients, didn’t you? Maybe called them from the car, while Zant was on the phone? Or from the tavern while you waited for your taxi?” Bruce nodded, confirming his own hypothesis. “You called your clients and told them it looked like he’d be tied up in the Landing for a while, and they sent somebody to search his house.”
“I can’t confirm that.”
“You don’t have to. And don’t worry. I know you didn’t kill Zant. Neither did your clients. He was too valuable alive.”
Revived, the lawyer walked him to the door of the conference room. “You’re right, Bruce. I’m in a jam. I need something to show my clients. You have to help. They say you’re a dogged investigator. I’m sure you’ll track down Zant’s surplus.”
“There is no reason in the world for me to help you.”
“You don’t want my clients to become active, believe me. I can keep them quiet if I can tell them you’re willing to share what you find.”
Bruce felt the delicious thrill of approaching combat. “I’m not afraid of your clients.”
Tricky Tony laid a hand on his arm. “You’re not the only person involved in this, Bruce. So think about it, okay?”
In the anteroom, Gayle Gittelman bustled over. “So did you get some useful info? Anything I can trade?”
“Your client,” said Bruce, “is not a pleasant man.”
“Yeah?” She got up on her toes and whispered. “Well, his clients are worse.”
CHAPTER 44
THE NEST
(I)
TO ROMANTIC DEMOGRAPHERS, to say nothing of restaurant critics, the city of Elm Harbor was deliciously multi-ethnic, offering, in a single block of Henley Street not far from the campus, Russian or Ethiopian or Korean or Italian or Irish or Malaysian or Greek cuisine: and that was just the north side of the street. “A lived monument to diversity,” the mayor liked to say of the depressed metropolis over which he so corruptly reigned.
So ran the official story.
Residents of the Nest, the unflattering nickname of the worst of the city’s trio of ethnically black neighborhoods, would tell a different story. The Nest began three blocks northwest of the campus and ran as fast as it could for about another ten or twelve—the border was as unreliable as the police patrols—and few students entered it willingly, other than a handful of idealistic undergraduate volunteers who tutored elementary-school children or ran Boy Scout troops, and who were as a result considered eccentric, or just plain foolish, by their fellows. To those who lived and generally died in the Nest—the Nesters, they had come to call themselves, probably in solidaritous self-defense—the city of Elm Harbor was demographically simple: there were the blacks and there were the whites, and no place, except perhaps for the welfare office and the courthouse, did the twain ever meet.
The Nesters believed that the rest of the city liked it this way.
Julia Carlyle did not share the Nesters’ view of the city, but, although she would never admit it, even to Lemmie, she often shared the city’s view of the Nesters. The Nest, for Julia, was a darkly dangerous spot, gangs of sullen hip-hoppers on every corner, ready to flash into violent action at any instant.
The empiricist was digging up her facts the hard way now. No choice, really.
Julia passed public-housing projects, squat and endless, red brick low-rises built forty years ago or more on the theory that the poor needed a kind of transitional residence on their way up into the working class. Mothers younger than Vanessa sat on the stoops with their children in bright blue strollers, taking the winter air and listening on earphones and flirting with the boys as though, having burdened themselves with a baby or two apiece, they were ready to try for more.
Between the housing projects were rows of single-family homes. Perhaps they had once been rather fancy. Now some were boarded up, and others had iron bars on the windows, and few showed much sign of life. In one of the yards, two boys who looked to be about three years old were enjoying a snowball fight. An inexpensive sports car blocked half the road up ahead for no better reason than that the driver had spied an acquaintance and wanted to chat. As Julia cruised by, their envious eyes followed the blue Mercedes, as did the music they were generous enough to share, their tastes not unlike Lemaster’s, the bass cranked so high she could feel the beat pounding within her bre
astbone.
There were businesses, too, with cheaply lettered signs, most devoted to food, or nails and hair, or furniture rental, the triumvirate that evidently represented the principal needs of her people, because one found them everywhere. There were funeral parlors. There was a barbershop. There were churches galore, from AME to Baptist to a bewildering spread of nondenominational congregations to simple storefronts, in which some hefty woman with a calling—Lemaster’s dismissive phrase—would set herself up as bishop and call her mission a tabernacle and be right in business.
There was the street.
Julia braked hard, having almost missed the turn, but the Mercedes was up to the task, cornering smartly without shimmy, and without burning any rubber. She found the address easily, a small, neat row house, layered in green paint and in considerable need of more, with the curtains drawn, and, in the yard, a plastic tricycle with only two wheels leaning against the low hurricane fence.
This was still the Nest, so she checked around the car before unlocking the door, then stepped smartly onto the front porch, keeping the Mercedes in view even though the alarm was on. A light-footed tread in the hallway answered her ring. A vertical window was set along one side of the door, and the curtain twitched. A dark face gazed out, and Julia offered her best smile, but the face was already gone. A baby wailed, though it might have been another house. She heard the ragged metallic clunking of a series of bolts and chains being undone, and it occurred to her that the windows possessed no bars. Lemaster claimed that one could tell a high-crime area by the barred windows.
The door opened, and Julia stifled a sound of surprise.
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