by David Black
2
Jack leaned on a fence in the city’s waterfront park, watching a barge move up the Hudson River. The water smelled fetid. Rotting vegetation and spilled oil. The wind rippled the water’s surface, making it look like crumpled tin foil. Sciortino sauntered up and leaned on the fence next to Jack.
“The clerk at the motel, the one Frank died in last night,” Sciortino said. “’Bout an hour ago, he was murdered, stabbed half a dozen times with his desk spindle.”
“If the man used an accordion file,” Jack said, “maybe he’d still be alive.”
“Jack,” Sciortino said, heaving himself back from the fence, “we never met. I never told you any of this.” He took a step away. “I couldn’t have,” he added. “After all, you’re a suspect.”
3
Jack parked his blue Mustang convertible in front of a condominium near the Marina, a renovated boarding house, which from the 1920s to the early-1960s had doubled as cat-house and which in the late 1990s was gutted and rebuilt. The vapor lights cast a sulfurous glow on the half-empty parking lot. On the Hudson, shadowy boats rode at anchor.
Jack got out of his car, the door slam sounding hollow in the dark. Across the parking lot, a torn page from The Racing Form chased itself in circles; the wind ruffled the cuffs of Jack’s slacks. His jacket over his shoulder, Jack headed toward the door of his condominium.
From the water, mist rose in strands, like a beaded curtain, which, opened, revealed other mists, elongated ghostly figures, like alien Tall Grays, drifting onto shore.
Jack felt droplets on his face.
The spectral mists passed Jack in endless procession. Muffled footsteps seemed to be hurrying by. Warning whispers seemed to swirl out of the air. And soft, dreamy music, singing? Jack couldn’t make out the words.
Jack felt a tickle on his cheek. He turned and saw a cadaverous face vanishing into the mists behind him.
“What do you want?” Jack asked.
Whoever it was laughed, and the laugh sounded like ripping canvas.
“Who are you?” Jack asked.
Whoever it was began singing again. Minor strains. Words still indistinct.
Jack shivered.
“Don’t start something you can’t finish,” the specter whispered.
When Jack was twelve years old, on the way home from a school chorus trip to a state competition, he had shared a row in the bus with a girl two years older than he was. She was already well developed. Her nipples, the size of egg yolks, pressed against her tight white ribbed pullover. What was her name? Jack couldn’t recall. In the dim blue light flickering from passing streetlamps, Jack had fumbled under her top, the first time he had ever touched a woman’s breasts. Daintily, she plucked up the hem of her skirt, inviting Jack to touch her nylon-covered crotch, which Jack did, finding a surprising moistness. She moaned and told Jack, “Don’t start something you can’t finish.”
“What do you want!” Jack hissed, grabbing a wrist. Not bony as he had expected, but massive.
Out of the mists loomed a hulking man with a face ruined by bar fights and disappointment. More from disappointment. He wore a pea-green workshirt, gray work pants held up with both a belt and suspenders, and well-worn high-top old-fashioned fawn-colored lace-up work boots. Jack’s older brother.
“What are you doing here, Bix?” Jack asked.
“Looking after you, Jackie,” Bix said, twisting off Jack’s grip on his wrist. His voice was breathy, with a whistle from when he was punched in the throat as a kid.
“Did you just see someone?” Jack asked. “Thin guy? Hear something?”
“Heard you shouting, baby-boy,” Bix said.
“I’m not the baby of the family anymore.”
“Sure, you are, Jackie. And just like old times, you’re in trouble again.”
Jack took one last glance around. The mists seemed to stand still. Rank upon rank of ghosts.
Jack opened the door to his building. Bix followed him in.
Silently, they went up in the elevator to the top floor, where Jack unlocked his apartment door. Inside the apartment—mirrors reflecting the light of the shadowy boats outside, lots of chrome and glass—Jack tossed his jacket onto a chair, turned on a table lamp, and sank into the black leather couch.
“You get the job at the prison?” Jack asked.
“Have to change my registration,” Bix said. “You know the Republicans control those jobs.”
“I’d help you if I could,” Jack said.
“Never asked you for help, Jackie,” Bix said. “Never will.”
“But you help me,” Jack protested.
Bix waved his hand.
“Your boss,” Bix said, “these high jinks of his, not smart, Jackie.”
“Everyone knew Frank had a weakness for trade,” Jack said.
Carefully, Bix lowered himself into a black leather chair.
“A man like that, a lawyer and all, what’s he doing in a crib like the Dutch Village with a noseful of powder?”
“After his divorce, Frank used to say, If I’m going to pay for love, it ain’t going to be alimony. And the drugs? Well, here’s a guy worked his way up from the docks to law school—”
“One of us, yeah.”
“—got the dream job, dream wife—”
“Except it was somebody else’s dream.”
“He’s pushing retirement, never sowed his wild oats—”
“Man should know you plant in spring, not autumn. You know, Jackie, you got a lot of Frank in you.”
“Because we’re both poor boys who learned how to wipe our feet before entering the parlor?”
“Your boss’s death. Wasn’t an accident, was it, Jackie?”
“You cut the product with cyanide, you don’t get repeat customers.”
“Who’d want to kill him?”
“Man’s been a lawyer almost forty years. Who wouldn’t want to?”
“Who’d want to frame you?”
“No frame. I was the wild card. Frank keels over. The gal calls me. I show up. That wasn’t in anybody’s plan.”
“You think?”
“Anyway maybe it was an accident.”
“Maybe tomorrow morning I’ll wake up rich.”
Jack shrugged.
“Who beat up the young stuff?”
“Not Frank. If he did before he snorted the cyanide, why would she call for help. And after he snorted—”
“He wouldn’t have been able to see her, let alone hit her. So what are we saying? Someone comes in, sees her calling you, hanging up the phone…?”
“He hits her.”
“Maybe harder than he meant to.”
“Harder than he meant to a dozen times?”
Bix shrugged.
“Man likes his work. He got carried away.”
“Leaves her for dead.”
“And calls the cops knowing you’d show up.”
“His lucky day. He’s got a patsy to take the rap for the hooker.”
“Except she doesn’t die.”
“If she ever wakes up,” Jack said, “we find out who hit her. If she doesn’t…?”
Jack and Bix exchanged a look.
“I’m not going back,” Jack said, “not to where I started.”
“You worked hard,” Bix said. “No reason why you should. But things being what they are … The old place … No one’s used it since we grew up, left…”
Jack looked out at the shadowy boats.
“Take some time out there, Jackie, a week, two. Get out of the spotlight.”
Bix stood, huge in the glass-and-chrome room.
“Thanks for stopping by, Bix,” Jack said.
“You’re blood,” Bix said. “Family’s all anyone’s really got.”
After Bix left, Jack pressed the replay button on his answering machine and heard, “Jack, this is Judge Long. I’ve been trying to reach you all day. Give me a call at home. It’s pretty important.”
CHAPTER FIVE
1
>
The cleaning lady was just turning off her vacuum when Caroline let herself into the dim reception area of Milhet & Alvarez.
“What’re you doing here in the middle of the night, Miss Wonder?” the cleaning lady asked.
“Couldn’t sleep,” Caroline said.
“Most people can’t sleep drink hot milk, don’t go to work.”
“That’s my trouble, Sue. I’ve spent my life trying to prove I’m not most people.”
As Caroline headed toward her office, the cleaning lady said, “Mr. Slidell … Guess he couldn’t sleep either.”
2
Jack heard Caroline enter his office. Or ex-office. But didn’t respond. Jack sat in his desk chair, facing away from his desk, looking out the window at the city and the Hudson River night. His jacket was off, his shirt sleeves rolled up, not to the forearms like a professional, but to his biceps like a laborer.
On his desk was a bottle of Ezra Brooks. In his hand was a half-full glass of bourbon.
“You know,” Caroline said, “we don’t encourage drinking in the office.”
“I didn’t need encouragement,” Jack said.
Caroline picked up the bottle.
“There’s another glass in the cupboard,” Jack said.
“I wasn’t planning to join you,” Caroline said.
“I know.”
“In anything.”
“You don’t know what you’re missing.”
“Am I supposed to play Twenty Questions to find out what you’re doing here?”
Softly Jack sang “Shake, Rattle and Roll.”
Wearing dresses, the sun comes shining through …
“You keep standing in front of the window like that,” Jack said, “we could make it an oral exam.”
“With you all it would be is a pop quiz,” Caroline said, moving away from the window so the lights of the city no longer outlined her body.
She dropped the bottle into the wastebasket beside Jack’s desk.
“I’d rather see a church burn than good liquor wasted.”
“I never thought I’d hear you quoting Robert.”
“I was quoting him quoting his daddy.”
Caroline fought a smile. Jack noticed, said, “You hate to admit it, but I can be a charming SOB.…”
“Robert does quote his daddy a lot,” Caroline said.
“Family’s all anyone’s really got.”
“Another quote from Robert’s daddy?”
“No,” Jack said. “Someone else.”
Jack took a sip of the bourbon.
“I’m moving. Down to the boat basin.”
“That creepy place? It looks like a shantytown from somewhere down south. The Mississippi Delta. Someplace.”
“Where I grew up,” Jack said.
“Sorry,” Caroline said, “I…”
“Just until things quiet down,” Jack said. “I wrote a general memo with the address. In case anybody needs me. No phone in the place. So I’ll keep my cell charged. For a while at least. You got the number. I put that in the memo, too.”
“That’s what you came in for?” Caroline asked, glancing at the bank of file cabinets lining the hall outside Jack’s office. One drawer was not pushed in all the way. “Not to look through Frank’s files?”
“In a couple of hours,” Jack said, “I went through a couple of decades of paperwork, right.”
“Maybe a couple of months?” Caroline said. “Ending a couple of days ago?”
Jack ignored her.
“I can run the cell off the car engine if I have to,” he said.
“Find anything interesting in Frank’s files?” Caroline asked. “A smoking gun? A confession? Something to flush out Frank’s killer?”
“Funny,” Jack said, “how we both assume he was murdered.…”
“I was joking, Jack,” Caroline said.
“Right,” Jack said. “I talked to Judge Long.” He finished what was in his glass. “Looks like my license is going to be suspended.”
“Oh, Jack.…”
“At least. Maybe something worse.”
Jack swung his chair around.
“Do me a favor, Five Spot?”
Caroline nodded.
“Fish out that bottle for me.”
Caroline hesitated, then retrieved the bourbon bottle, which she handed to Jack.
“And on your way out…”
“Don’t let the door hit me in the ass?”
“Something like that.”
Jack swiveled his chair back around, facing away from Caroline. She left. Jack poured himself another half glass and took a long pull.
3
Jack parked beside a small fishing cabin in a marsh on the fringe of town. A dozen other cabins, all needing repair, stretched along the Hudson. A few skiffs lay upside down, their curved, ribbed bottoms making them look like giant beetles.
Jack climbed out of his car with a single suitcase and a new bottle of Ezra Brooks in a paper bag and walked along some half-rotted planks into his shack. Jack inhaled the familiar childhood smell of mud and rotting wood.
Inside, he put down his suitcase, tilted the glass chimney of a kerosene lantern, snapped a match on his thumbnail and lit the wick. Over the windows, the white curtains were stiff with soot. On a table beside the bed, which ran along the far wall, was a gray ceramic basin and white enameled pitcher with a chipped red enameled line decorating the pour spout. Above the basin and pitcher a small shaving mirror hung on a twopenny nail. The slate sink had an old-fashioned hand pump. A bottle-gas refrigerator stood on a cinder block next to a two-burner stove.
Jack stretched out on the bed, the springs twanging, and closed his eyes, but couldn’t stop his racing mind.
CHAPTER SIX
1
Ringing woke Jack, who stumbled out of bed and fumbled in his pants pocket for his cell phone.
“Slidell.”
“Sorry to wake you,” Sciortino said. “Forty minutes ago, the hooker died. The boys are on their way out to pick you up.”
“Accessory, manslaughter 3?”
“You wish. You’re a lawyer. They figure you should’ve known better. It’s man 2.”
Jack hung up the telephone.
2
Sciortino walked with Jack from the Columbia County Court House.
“At least,” Sciortino said, “you made bail.”
“I get arrested once more,” Jack said, “I’ll have to start using credit cards. What do we know about the girl? Her name? Fingerprints? Record? The bouquet? Anything?”
Sciortino shrugged.
“We got a couple of guys on it,” he said. “It’s an open case, Jack, I can’t mouth off to you.”
“You remember when I was in law school?”
“You worked harder than anyone I know. Eighteen, nineteen hour days. Classes. Hitting the books. Then, hauling on the docks.”
“For what? To get caught in someone else’s mess, see everything I worked for go down the tubes?”
“We got nothing, Jack.”
Jack stopped. So did Sciortino.
“Prints don’t match up to any in the records,” Sciortino said. “No lead on the bouquet. The nurses on duty said it just appeared. We asked around the crib joints, escort services. From Albany to Springfield. No one says any of their girls are missing. Our CIs on the street, no one heard anything.”
Jack started walking again. Sciortino called after him, “We’ll turn up something, Jack. These things take time.”
Sciortino watched Jack get into his car, start the engine, and drive away.
3
Jack headed across the cemetery toward his car. The wind had dropped, although on his way to the funeral Jack had heard that the hurricane was moving up the coast. They’d been lucky so far, but the storm that had been threatening for days would eventually hit. Jack wondered how bad it would be and if he should tape the windows in his shack.
The still air carried the priest’s words from Frank’s grave: “God loved
the world so much, He gave us His only Son that all who believe in Him might have eternal life.”
Jack felt rather than heard the bass thud from the sound system of a car passing on the mall road skirting the cemetery.
“Have mercy, Lord.…” The priest’s words were lost in the still air.
Caroline left her uncle Dixie and sister Nicole, who were at Frank’s grave, and hurried to catch up to Jack, who stopped when he saw her coming.
“Are you okay?” she asked.
“Yeah,” Jack said. “I’m okay.”
“That’s it?” Caroline asked.
Jack shrugged.
“You never struck me as a quitter,” she said. “I can see you walking away from the job, from me, even from yourself, from everything you worked for. But from Frank?”
She walked beside Jack toward Jack’s car.
“The way I hear it,” she said, “you got out of law school and sent out … what was it? A hundred, two hundred résumés? They used to joke about it in the office. Jack Slidell, the guy who doesn’t give up.”
“The human pit bull, huh?” Jack said.
“That’s right,” Caroline said.
“I never liked that,” Jack said.
“Two hundred résumés,” Caroline said. “And one hundred ninety-nine rejections.”
“Never liked that either.”
“When no one else would give you a break, Frank hired you.”
Jack opened his car door.
“Someone murdered Frank,” Caroline said, “and framed you.”
“We don’t know that,” Jack said.
Caroline waited.
“Frank’s dead,” Jack said, sliding behind the steering wheel. “And I don’t have a lot more to lose.”
“Then what’s stopping you?” Caroline asked.
Jack started the car and, without even a wave, drove away.
CHAPTER SEVEN
1
Caroline headed up the dirt road, her car bouncing in the ruts. When she turned through the broad leaves that splayed across her window and first saw Jack’s shack, she stopped for a moment before driving the last two dozen feet and parking in the mud next to Jack’s car. From beside her on the front seat she took a large manila envelope and, getting out of the car, climbed the cinder block steps to the front porch.