Black River

by G. M. Ford

  Corso stopped for a moment and looked up at the clouds, grateful for a break in the relentless rain. Overhead, a swirling sky held the promise of more, and the air was heavy with water. Fall had arrived as a silver river, slanting down from the sky, day after day, for weeks on end. Even a brief respite from the deluge lessened the gloom.

  Taking a deep breath, Corso shuddered inside his overcoat, before crossing Seventh Avenue and starting over the freeway bridge. Ahead, the crowd rippled like a snake. He stopped on the corner. Shouted questions pulled his gaze to the left, where an ocean of photographers suddenly raised their cameras above their heads and began snapping away. Atop the satellite trucks, cameramen scrambled to their feet and began squinting through viewfinders.

  Two men and a woman were striding south on Sixth Avenue: the federal prosecution team. Corso’s mind began to flip through the pages of their dossiers, as he watched them stroll up the street. The guy in the rumpled trench coat was Raymond Butler. He was the gofer, the research guy. An AGO lifer, Butler went all the way back to Balagula’s first trial in San Francisco, before they understood what kind of animal they were dealing with. They found out the hard way when their star witnesses, a pair of construction superintendents named Joshua Harmon and Brian Swanson, disappeared from a Vallejo motel and were subsequently found floating in San Pablo Bay, alongside the pair of Alameda County sheriff’s deputies who’d been assigned to guard them. This turn of events left the judge in the first trial no choice but to declare a mistrial. The public outcry for justice prompted the feds to seek a change of venue: north to Seattle where, they hoped, a second trial could be conducted beyond the reach of Balagula’s tentacles.

  The guy without the overcoat was Warren Klein, current golden boy of the U.S. Attorney General’s Office. A real Horatio Alger story. A poor boy who graduated fourth in his class at Yale, deemed too rough around the edges for major law firms, he signed on with the AG’s office and hit it big when a string of successful organized crime prosecutions down in Miami propelled him from relative obscurity to the lead position in what figured to be the most public trial sinceO. J. Simpson. Off the record, his colleagues found him cold and conniving and, behind his back, whispered that his appointment as lead counsel had surely put him in over his head. Corso’s sources thought otherwise. Word on the street was that Klein had something up his sleeve. Rumor had it that he’d turned a witness, somebody who could tie Nicholas Balagula directly to the Fairmont Hospital collapse. If it was true, rough edges or not, Warren Klein was about to enjoy the lifestyle of the rich and famous.

  On the inside, closest to the narrow boxwood hedge, was Renee Rogers, lead prosecutor in the last trial. Once the best and brightest, her star had dimmed considerably when, last year in Seattle, Balagula’s second trial had ended in a hung jury. That the trial had been held amid the tightest security in state history, and had also been among its most costly, had further fueled the fire of public outrage when an anonymous sequestered jury had failed to agree on what every legal pundit in the country had assumed to be an open-and-shut case. The likelihood of jury tampering and persistent whispers of a drinking problem had carried away any chance for Rogers’s further advancement with the AG’s office. This time around, she was in the second chair and rumored to be shopping the private sector.

  Lost in thought, Corso watched the paparazzi move along the sidewalk like a meal going down a python. A sudden click of heels pulled his attention to his side. The name tag said Sunny Kerrigan. The logo on the camera and the hand-held microphone read KING 5 News. He’d seen her before. She was the second-banana weekend anchor.

  “Mr. Corso,” she said, “could we have a few minutes of your time?” The cameraman took a step forward. She pushed the mike up at Corso’s face. He stepped around her and started across the street. She trotted along at his heels like a terrier.

  “Is it true, Mr. Corso, that you’re acting as a consultant to the prosecution, and this is why you’re the only spectator allowed in the courtroom?”

  Corso lengthened his stride and veered off to the left. He was halfway across the street when she hustled around him and tried to block his path. “Could you tell us, Mr. Corso, whether or not—”

  He sidestepped her again, slapped the camera out of his face, and kept moving. “Hey,” the cameraman whined, as he fought to balance the camera on his shoulder. “No need for that.”

  “Mr. Corso…” she began.

  Whatever she had to say was drowned out by a roar from the crowd. At the south end of the block, the police lines parted, allowing a black Lincoln Town Car to roll along the face of the building. The air was suddenly filled with the click of lenses and the whir of automatic winders. The crowd surged along with the car, creeping down the block as the Lincoln moved slowly along. Kerrigan shot him a disgusted look before she and the cameraman hurried off and disappeared into the melee. Corso breathed a sigh of relief.

  He picked up his pace, moving the opposite way, toward the area just deserted by the crowd. He walked along the helmeted line of cops until he spotted a sergeant standing behind a barrier. He held up the laminated ID card. The sergeant stepped up, reached between a pair of officers, and plucked the card from Corso’s fingers. He looked from Corso to the card and back. “Okay,” he said, after a moment.

  The barrier was pulled aside and Corso stepped through.

  “Quite the spectacle,” Corso offered.

  “It’s crap,” the sergeant said. “California ought to clean up its own mess instead of sending it up north to us.”

  He had a point. This had all started three years ago when, following a minor seismic tremor, the west wall of the newly completed Fairmont Hospital in Hayward, California, had collapsed, killing sixty-three people, forty-one of them children. Subsequent investigation revealed the structure had been built amid a web of extortion, falsified bids, and assorted frauds, including substandard concrete, nonexistent earthquake protection, and fabricated inspection records. They also found that all roads, however tenuous and well disguised, led to one Nicholas Balagula, a former Russian gangster who had, over the past decade, carved out a substantial U.S. criminal empire beneath the noses of the California authorities. As the bulk of the hospital’s financing was provided by a federal grant, the case was deemed to be within the federal jurisdiction and assigned to the federal prosecutor’s office.

  “Oughta just take that Balagula guy out and shoot him,” the sergeant said.

  “I’m with you there.”

  Forty yards north, the crowd now filled the entire northbound lane of Sixth Avenue. The Lincoln’s taillights blinked twice and then went out, as it stopped in front of the rear entrance to the courthouse. Both rear doors popped open.

  First out was Bruce Elkins, Balagula’s attorney. He carried an aluminum briefcase in one hand and a brown overcoat in the other. He was a short barrel-chested specimen who, these days, favored Armani suits and hundred-dollar custom-made shirts. On two separate occasions, he had attempted to resign from the case. The courts, however, mindful of a defendant’s right to the counsel of his choice, had respectfully disagreed.

  Next out was Mikhail Ivanov, Nicholas Balagula’s longtime right-hand man. He was a nondescript man of sixty-three with a full head of gray hair and an unreadable face as bland and blank as a cabbage. In the last fifty years, Ivanov had helped Balagula cut an unparalleled criminal swath across three continents, picking up scraps as Balagula amassed a personal fortune rumored to be in the hundreds of millions of dollars. Faithful as a dog, on two occasions with the law closing in he’d saved his boss by stepping forward and confessing to the crimes. He’d served seven years on the first occasion and four the next. These days, he billed himself as Balagula’s financial planner. Sources said he’d been squirreling money away lately, in foreign banks. Looked like he might be about ready to retire.

  Ivanov turned in a full circle to survey the scene and then leaned down and spoke into the car.

  Nicholas Balagula emerged from the l
imo at a lope. His shaven head reflected the dozens of flashbulbs that were firing all over the street. For court, Balagula dressed strictly off the rack, wearing a blue Sears, Roe-buck suit that made him look every inch the beleaguered building supply dealer his attorney painted him to be. He acknowledged the snarling crowd with a small wave. The air was filled with shouts of his name and the whirring of cameras as he hurried across the sidewalk and disappeared through the doors, with Mikhail Ivanov bringing up the rear.

  Elkins had bellied up to the barricades to work the media. For the past week, during jury selection, he’d been a fixture on the evening news, claiming that the seating of an anonymous jury behind a one-way Plexiglas screen was a clear violation of his client’s right to face his accusers and that bringing his client to court a third time was little more than vengeful retribution by a defeated and embarrassed prosecution, whom, as everyone knew, he was going to best for a third and final time.

  “Frank!” a woman’s voice called.

  Corso turned toward the sound. Six feet tall without the big Doc Martens, Meg Dougherty was striding along in front of the cops. One camera dangled from her neck, another was slung over her shoulder. Everything black: clothes, hair, nails, everything—a cross between Morticia Addams and Betty Paige in a full-length black velvet cape.

  “What a zoo,” she said, with a grimace. She stopped a pace away from the line of cops. “You suppose you boys could step aside for a minute, so a girl could give a guy a hug?”

  Corso glanced over at the sergeant, who pursed his lips in thought.

  “She stays outside the barrier,” he said.

  Dougherty nodded okay. The sergeant checked the crowd and said, “Give the lady a little room.” The two cops directly in front of her stepped out into the street.

  Corso and Dougherty stepped into the breach and shared a hug, a hug long enough and hard enough to embarrass them both and send them reeling away from each other like opposite poles of a magnet. Corso brushed at his coat, while she tugged her sleeves back down over the tattooed words and leaves and tendrils that spiraled their way around her arms.

  “There seems to be a barrier between us,” he joked.

  “There always was, Frank.”

  They hugged again, and he remembered the smell of her, something like vanilla and cinnamon. After a moment, they stepped back and stood in silence, taking each other in.

  “How’re things going?” he asked.

  “Same old,” she said. “And you?”

  “Busy.”

  “I saw you on television the other night.”

  He shrugged. “Got a new publicist. She’s a real go-getter.”

  She gestured up the street. “Way too many bodies for me,” she said. “I never had much taste for full-contact photography.”

  “What else are you working on?” Corso asked.

  “The usual. Freelancing for anybody with the cash. Trying to put a new show together.” She offered a wan smile. “Always hoping to come up with that one big story that will put me over the top and turn me into the next Frank Corso.”

  He opened his mouth to protest, but she kept on talking.

  “You seen the papers?”

  He shook his head. She checked her watch.

  “So you haven’t heard what they found buried in the bridge footing?”

  “What?”

  “A truck.”

  “I’ve missed you,” he said, out of the blue.

  She shifted her weight and looked up at the steel-wool sky. Up the street, Bruce Elkins had abandoned the crowd and smiled his way inside.

  “Me too,” Dougherty said finally.

  “I think of you a lot. Maybe we could—”

  “Don’t,” she said. “We agreed…remember?”

  “Way I recall it was more like you agreed.”

  “Whatever,” she snapped.

  Corso’s lips tightened. He turned away.

  She winced and put a hand on his arm. “I didn’t mean it like that…like it sounded.” When he didn’t respond, she stepped in closer and lowered her voice. “It was too much for me, Corso. It felt like beating my head against a brick wall.”

  He looked at her over his shoulder. “At least it wasn’t boring.”

  “What it was was exhausting. I always felt I was on the outside looking in.” She waved a hand in the air. “You’re like a stone. I shared myself with you, Frank.” She slashed the air again. “Willingly…blissfully… and seven months later I didn’t know any more about you than I did when I started.”

  She stepped around in front of him and took his face in her hands.

  “Besides…”

  The cop on Corso’s right turned his face away, as if embarrassed to be listening.

  Corso cleared his throat. “Maybe we should do a nice platonic dinner or something. Catch up on old times and all that.”

  “Besides,” she said again, louder this time, “I’ve got a boyfriend. It’s been over a year, Frank.”

  Corso’s pale eyes flickered.

  “People pair up. That’s what happens here on earth. It’s how we keep the planet populated.”

  “I didn’t say anything,” Corso protested. “Did I say anything?”

  “You didn’t have to. Besides…he’d go crazy if I went without him. I’ve told him all about you.”

  Corso made a rude noise with his lips. “I know you. You’ve been rubbing his nose in my famous-author status, haven’t you?”

  She laughed. “Only when he really deserves it. He’s read all your books. He says you’re a passable stylist.”

  Corso’s face arranged itself into something between a sneer and a smile.

  “He’s super jealous of you, but at the same time, another part of him really wants to meet the famous author I used to hang with.” She bopped Corso lightly in the arm. “You know how childish guys are.”

  “Sure…bring him along. We’ll all be chums.”

  “You’ll like him.”

  “No I won’t, but bring him along anyway,” Corso said.

  Again she laughed that deep laugh of hers and poked him in the chest with a long black fingernail. “This gonna be one of those bullshit I’ll-have-my-people-call-your-people things, or are we really gonna get together?”

  To help Corso make up his mind, she reached inside the cape and came out with a small black leather notebook. She stood pencil poised, a determined expression on her face.

  Corso heaved a sigh. “How about Saturday night at the Coastal Kitchen?” he said. “Like around seven or so.”

  She wrote it down with a flourish and looked up. “You’ll be pleasant.”

  “Don’t worry. I’ll make nice to the boyfriend.”

  “You could bring somebody. Maybe that would—”

  He was already shaking his head. She sighed.

  “You’ve gone back to being a hermit, haven’t you?”

  Corso shrugged. “You know me. I’m relationship-challenged.”

  “It would really help if you didn’t hate everybody.”

  “I don’t—” he began.

  “Uh-oh,” Dougherty said, “I think your cover’s blown.”

  Sunny Kerrigan and her cameraman were leading a knot of media types down the street in their direction. “Shit,” Corso muttered.

  Dougherty stepped back from the barrier. The cops closed ranks. She got up on tiptoe and yelled over their heads, “Saturday! Seven!”

  Corso nodded and turned away. He could hear the Kerrigan woman talking into her microphone. “This is Sunny Kerrigan, KING Five News, reporting live from the first day of the Nicholas Balagula trial, where reclusive author Frank Corso…”

  He pulled his collar up around his ears and hunched his shoulders as he started up the street. That night, news footage would show a headless apparition in a black overcoat pulling open the courthouse door and disappearing inside.

  3

  Tuesday, October 17

  10:05 a.m.

  Renee Rogers flicked her eyes toward
the stairs just in time to see Corso mount the last three steps to the mezzanine. He was even better looking in person than he was on TV, she decided: six-three or-four, somewhere in the vicinity of forty, wearing a black silk shirt and jeans under what must have been a three-thousand-dollar cashmere overcoat. A man of extremes, she thought, as he strode across the marble floor in her direction. Probably what got him in so much trouble, way back when.

  While he didn’t exactly swagger, his walk was ripe with attitude. Something in his movements suggested he didn’t much care what other people thought. She wondered what he was covering up with all the physical bravado.

  He walked across the marble floor and stopped by her side. He held out his hand and said, “Frank Corso.”

  She took his hand in hers and was surprised at how rough it was and how small her own hand seemed in comparison. “Renee Rogers,” she said.

  Over his shoulder, she watched Klein and Butler come out of the men’s room together. Klein’s narrow eyes widened for a moment when he caught sight of Corso. He straightened his vest and came quickly across the floor in their direction.

  Renee Rogers had a good idea what was coming. When Klein had received the memo stating that an exception to the no-spectators rule was being made for a writer named Frank Corso, he’d gone ballistic. While a quick reprimand from the AG herself had closed his mouth, it hadn’t had any effect on his anger.

  He pulled up by Corso’s right elbow. Corso again offered his hand. Klein didn’t so much as look at it. Instead, he stepped between Corso and Rogers, as close to nose-to-nose with Corso as a guy eight inches shorter could get.

  “I don’t know what kind of strings your publisher pulled to get you in here, but whatever it was doesn’t carry any weight with me.”

  “He went to college with the Attorney General,” Corso offered.

  “And those Ivy League types do stick together, don’t they?”

  “You should know,” Corso said.

  Klein’s neck was beginning to redden. “I went to Yale on a scholarship. I didn’t have a rich set of parents picking up the tab. I bussed dishes and swept floors.”