Where Nobody Dies

by Carolyn Wheat

“Don’t be a smartass,” Lessek snapped. “There’s no connection between me and Linda, so it doesn’t matter when she was killed. It’s not my problem.”

  “Then what am I doing here?”

  “God knows,” he answered simply. “You could be angling for a piece of the action. Lots of people want a piece of me right now. Or you could be putting on a little squeeze, like some of the sleazo politicians who just remembered I gotta have this variance and that license before I can go ahead, and it just so happens they know a lawyer who can get it for me. Their brother-in-law. Or maybe you want to stop the project—or at least hold it up long enough to get some cheap publicity by taking a whack at me. Sometimes I feel like an elephant covered by a swarm of ants. And I’m getting sick and tired of it. Linda Ritchie was nothing to me alive and she’s even less to me dead. I don’t know Elliott Pilcher except to say hello to on the street. Is that for God’s sake the end of this conversation?” Lessek’s utter weariness was touching; he was Robert Redford all but beaten by his enemies yet gallant to the end. It was a shame to spoil the scene.

  “If you don’t know Elliott Pilcher,” I asked softly, “then why is he listed as one of your limited partners? Do you always let mere acquaintances in on the ground floor of your biggest deals?”

  “Did the little creep tell you that himself, or do you have other sources?”

  “Linda told me.”

  “No, she didn’t. That little bitch never told anybody anything she didn’t have to tell. So don’t try to sell me that one.”

  “Okay. I found some papers after her death.”

  He nodded. “That I can buy. What did those papers have to say about me?”

  “Why should I tell you?”

  “Because I want to know. And because there are some things you want to know. And I don’t see why I should tell you anything when I don’t know what you already have. What I’ve seen so far,” he said brusquely, “doesn’t amount to a hill of shit.”

  “I know you’re paying off Elliott Pilcher. That’s bribery.”

  “Prove it. All you’ve told me is that you’ve seen Elliott’s name listed as limited partner.”

  “That’s pretty suggestive. Enough for Elliott to face some pretty tough questions.”

  “That’s his problem.”

  “You’re a swell guy to work for, aren’t you?” I was doing it again, falling back on sarcasm when real weapons had failed. I sighed inwardly and put my cards on the table, face up, hoping to God they amounted to something.

  “Okay. You’ve done a lot of renovations in this city. Buying empty hulks—most of them made empty by Ira Bellfield’s gestapo tactics. Then you’ve obtained low-interest loans, gotten tax breaks and zoning variances—all from the city and all whenever you needed them, no questions asked. You paid Art Lucenti for legal work when he was on the city council, even though he wasn’t supposed to represent clients before city agencies.” I caught the faint smile and amended crossly, “Oh, I forgot, that’s his problem, right?”

  The smile got broader. “Right. And before you continue your little diatribe, Ms. Jameson, let me tell you a few facts of life in the big city. You accuse me of buying buildings emptied by Ira Bellfield. Guilty. I’m what they call a ‘second-generation’ owner. The first generation—that’s Bellfield—are the slumlords, the ones who milk a building for profit without giving adequate services or putting anything back in. They’re the ones who do all the things the liberal newspapers cry about, the fires, the burglaries, the strong-arm stuff. It’s terrible, what they do,” he said mockingly, “but the important thing here is that I don’t do it. I just buy from those who do. I pick up what’s left when they’re finished.”

  “At a good price.”

  “Of course.” He ignored the sarcasm. “That’s how I can afford to stay in business. And what I do is upgrade the neighborhood, rehab the buildings, bring back the business.”

  “At only four times the old rent, too,” I marveled.

  “Since when is profit a dirty word?”

  “What about the loans and tax breaks? Who do you have to pay off?”

  His answering grin told me I’d just said something very amusing—and very stupid. The trouble was I didn’t know what.

  “You don’t do real estate, do you?” he asked. “Do the words as of right mean anything to you?”

  I frowned. “I’m not sure,” I replied lamely.

  “I thought as much. In order to avoid the possibility of the very suggestion you’re making,” he explained with maddening patience, “the law specifically provides that every owner of every building meeting certain specifications is entitled to low-interest loans and tax abatements in order to do repairs. These are granted as of right, which means, one, I don’t have to pay anybody anything to get them, and, two, I’m entitled to them even if I’m Attila the Hun, which, by the way, I’m not. So, Ms. Jameson, my suggestion to you is that before you come bursting into a man’s office accusing him of crimes, you do a little homework so that you know what you’re talking about. It might,” he added with a sneer, “prevent you from making a fool of yourself.”

  My face reddened; my exit from Lessek’s office, followed by his gloating laugh, was no triumph. But I didn’t feel like a fool. I’d lost a big pot, but I hadn’t really had the cards. Next time, I promised, I’d deal myself a better hand. I got out of the building as fast as I could and stood on the cobblestones drinking in the frigid river breeze as though it were fresh water after a polluted swim.

  I was so involved with my own thoughts that I failed to notice the footsteps that must have sounded on the cobblestones. The first thing I knew, a man wearing only a raincoat against the cruel wind stood before me, blocking my path. He was hatless; his ears looked on the verge of frostbite. His hands were jammed into his coat pockets, and his voice was a rasp.

  “You work for that bum.” It was less than a statement, but not quite a question. Recalling the high-fashion look of Lessek’s female staff, I felt vaguely complimented. I was about to deny the truth of the assumption, when the man pulled a raw, red hand from his pocket and thrust a dirty envelope at me. “Give him this from me,” he urged. There was an unblinking intensity, a hint of fanaticism, about the man that was beginning to bother me. I looked around; not a soul on the waterfront. Not surprising, with a wind-chill of minus nine.

  “You’re making a mistake,” I said quietly. It was the same calming tone I used with crazy people in the pens in Criminal Court. “I don’t work for Lessek; I was just seeing him on business.”

  “Don’t give me that.” He shoved the envelope into my midriff. “I’m tired of getting the runaround from you people. I got a right to get my message to Lessek, and I’m not going to be stopped. Not this time.”

  “Who’s stopping—” I began, ready to explain to the man just how paranoid he sounded, when suddenly, out of the shadows between the two warehouses, stepped two burly young men.

  “You again,” one of them said, raking over the old man with contemptuous eyes. The man in the raincoat, though a head shorter and thirty years older than the bruisers, returned their contempt. “Go ahead,” he offered, with a wave of his chapped hand, “get rough. Show me how tough you are. Break my nose like you did the first time.”

  “Don’t tempt me, Pop,” one of the musclemen snarled, stepping forward. The other, who had been frowning at me since he arrived on the scene, held out a restraining hand. He inclined his head toward me and shook it. “Mr. Lessek don’t want no trouble,” he remarked. Not with a witness around, I amended mentally.

  “Look,” the smart one said smoothly, spreading his hands covered with fur-lined leather gloves, “we don’t want a fuss here. Mr. Lessek’s a busy man and he can’t see you right now, so why don’t you and this young lady just go on about your business, okay?”

  The little man had come to the same conclusion I had: The bruisers didn’t want to be seen by a witness roughing up an old man. He decided being roughed up in front of a witness was exact
ly what he did want. “You gonna make me?” he taunted, his voice shrill. “You gonna rough me up? Come on, then,” he offered, beginning to dance like a boxer, “come on.”

  “Aw, go away,” the belligerent bruiser said with disgust. “Just get outa my sight, that’s all.”

  The clever one turned to me with an apologetic smile. “Mr. Lessek’s made a few enemies. We gotta see to it that he’s not harassed when he goes in and out of the building.”

  “Yeah,” his partner chimed in, “you ought to seen what this here lunatic’s done to Mr. Lessek. Carryin’ signs, passin’ out crazy flyers, all about how Mr. Lessek killed his business.”

  “How awful.” I shook my head in mock dismay. “Exercising his First Amendment rights,” I commiserated. “And on public property, too.”

  “What about creosote?” the belligerent guard challenged. “You call that First Amendment rights, spreading creosote all over the sidewalk?”

  “Not to mention the eggs,” his buddy added. “You like egg-throwing, don’t you, Pop?”

  The man in the raincoat was still dancing, still inviting a fight, but with less energy as he realized he wasn’t going to get it.

  “Look, Pop,” said the clever guard with what was supposed to be affectionate exasperation, “you remember what the judge told you when you got busted and had to go to court. If we so much as see you on this sidewalk, it’s a violation of the court order and we can have you put in jail. Now, I don’t want to be a hardnose here, so I’m not gonna do that—provided you get away from the building right now. Okay?”

  It was the voice of sweet reason. An honest businessman was being hassled by an obvious wacko and the guard was being a lot nicer about it than he had to be. Why didn’t I buy it? Was it just because Lessek had pinned my ears back and I wanted to believe the worst about him, or was it because I sensed that if I weren’t there, those two thugs would have made hamburger out of a freezing old man and liked it?

  The old man knew it, too. Puffing ominously, he stopped moving and said, “Okay. You win. You can buy more judges than I can. But”—he pointed a shaking finger at the guards, who were smiling at him with amused contempt—“I’ll be back.”

  “I’ll bet you will,” one of them murmured as we turned and walked away from the waterfront, the wind whipping at us as we rounded the corner to start up the hill. We were almost at Henry Street when my companion said, “Abe Schine. Royal Baseball Cap Company.”

  “I saw your logo in the lobby,” I replied. “I’m Cassandra Jameson. I’d like to ask you about Lessek. Would you like some coffee?”

  The coffee shop was so overheated, the windows steamed. I usually hate that, but after the numbing cold of the waterfront, it felt wonderful. It must have felt even better to poor Abe, who blew on his raw hands and held his hot cup with both hands when it came. I waited for him to warm up enough to let the story unfold.

  “People don’t wear baseball caps like they used to,” Abe Schine began. “Once upon a time, inna fifties, you had your Dodgers, your Giants, your Yanks—alia kids wanted caps. Plus,” he added proudly, “we made ’em for the players too. Official baseball caps, with hand-sewn insignias. I had twenny girls workin’ for me in those days. Sewing machines clackin’ all day, phones ringin’ from orders comin’ in. Music to my ears.”

  “What happened?”

  He shrugged. “Dodgers went off to California. Fellas started watchin’ football. Only trouble with football—no caps. How you gonna tell what team somebody’s for without he’s wearin’ a cap? Answer me that. I’m down to ten girls, then eight. Two salesmen. We’re just barely hanging’ on—but we’re still in there pitching, you should pardon the expression. Then”—his voice lowered and he leaned forward—“along comes this momser Lessek. Wants to buy us out—that’s what he says at first. Help us relocate. Queens, the Island, New Jersey—wherever. Which I’m not in favor of at all. I’m a Brooklyn boy all my life, what do I know from the Island? My girls are all old now, they can’t commute all the way to Jersey. One of my salesmen’s got terminal cancer. He shouldn’t be working at all, but what the hell, retirement’ll kill him so I let him come into work, write up some orders—he’s gonna take the E train to Queens? Does Lessek care? Hell, no! He wants me out, come hell or high water, and he don’t let nothing stand in his way.”

  The old man was trembling from cold and the intensity of his feelings. “Drink some coffee,” I urged. “It’ll warm you up.” He gulped a mouthful, and I motioned to the waitress to warm his cup. He didn’t notice.

  “First, it was the heat,” he said after a pause. “It was July, and we’d have steam hissin’ outa the radiators. I had no air conditioning; we never needed it. Just open the windows and the breeze off the river cools you off. But that don’t help when you’re being baked alive, so I had to shut down for two weeks, send all the girls home. We got behind in the orders. I was just catching up, had a whole shipment of caps ready to go out, when the flood happened. I couldn’t believe it. My biggest order, ruined. Lessek said it was a burst pipe, called it ‘an act of God.’” He shook his head. “I didn’t believe it. Not when the only damage in the building was to my cartons of finished goods.

  “It was the end,” he finished sadly. “I begged my customers for more time, I begged the banks to tide me over with a loan, but everybody was deaf all of a sudden. They had money in their ears, that’s why. Lessek’s money. It was in alia papers, how great the new development was gonna be, how it was gonna create new jobs.” Schine’s eyes wavered between tears and hot anger. “What about the old jobs? What about the old businesses? Answer me that!” Abe’s voice choked. “I was the last. Pearl sold out. So did Manny Helpern and Al Wong. They still got businesses. All I got is hate. You know what that momser told the television when he finally got into my place?” Abe’s face was distorted with rage, and his hands gripped the cup as though it were a lifeline. “He stood there in his Italian suit and blow-dried hair and looked at where my sewing machines used to be and said, ‘We’re going to transform this dump into something the city can be proud of.’” A tear hovered at the edge of one rheumy eye. “Dump! Forty years of my life and he calls it a dump!”

  “So that’s why you go to his office?”

  He nodded, suddenly shamefaced. “Hell, you think I like spreading creosote, throwing eggs? A man my age, he should be in Florida, warm in the sun, not freezing his ass off and making a fool out of himself. Oh, yeah,” he said, giving me a shrewd glance over the top of his coffee cup. “I know I’m a fool to think Lessek cares whether I’m picketing his place or not. Even the eggs don’t really bother him. He’s got the dough—he just buys another suit, that’s all.”

  Abe Schine looked down at his cracked red hands. “A man should have dignity when he gets to my age. But that Lessek—” His voice broke and the tears began to fall. “He stole my business, he stole my pension I had ready for my old age, and he stole my dignity. I got nothin’ left, nothin’.”

  11

  As I watched Dawn twisting her lips, gnawing at them like a small animal trying to free itself from a trap, I had a strong sense of déjà vu. We had come full circle, Dawn and I, back to Family Court, back to the issue of her custody.

  There the similarity to the last court appearance ended. Where Linda had sat, artificially prim and childlike, Marcy now projected her power image—black pin-striped suit, royal blue blouse, discreet gold jewelry. She was impeccable, not a hair out of place, as complacent as a spring breeze. She radiated confidence, ignoring her rival with an ostentation that bordered on contempt, as though afraid simple politeness would put her one down in the power game.

  I was conscious of a sinking feeling. Marcy was too sure of herself, too utterly certain that there could be no contest between her and Ma Ritchie for Dawn’s custody. While I was all for the power of positive thinking among my clients, I had the feeling Marcy had taken Dr. Peale’s advice a bit too literally. Just because Brad’s mother was a silly woman didn’t mean she could be d
iscounted. Viola Ritchie was a grandmother—a gray-haired, churchgoing, cookies-and-milk grandma—and that was more likely than a Ralph Lauren blouse to impress a Family Court judge. It was Norman Rockwell versus crabmeat quiche, and I doubted Bettinger was a quiche man.

  We started with a homily on Linda’s tragic death. Heads were appropriately bowed. Then Judge Bettinger assured Mrs. Ritchie that her son’s arrest for the murder would in no way prejudice her application for custody. The fact that Ma Ritchie failed to leap to her son’s defense was a tribute to her lawyer, who had clearly coached his client.

  When Bettinger asked me for an update on Dawn’s living situation, I described in glowing detail her bedroom in Marcy’s East Side co-op. I told him that although Dawn was continuing in her old school for the present, Marcy was looking into private schools. Let Ma Ritchie top that, I thought with satisfaction.

  She did. Private rooms, she implied with a sniff, were a dime a dozen. Dawn could have one in Bensonhurst with her. As for private schools, St. Anselm’s had been good enough for Brad and was right across the street. The clincher was that she had already talked to her boss at the supermarket about cutting down her hours at the checkout counter so she could be home when Dawn came in from school. Milk, I thought ruefully, and cookies.

  I sighed inwardly as Bettinger turned to Marcy and asked how many hours a week she put in at her office. It was the question I’d been dreading. In retrospect, my midnight session with Linda now seemed like child’s play, a mere rehearsal for dealing with her sister. Marcy cocked her head to one side and then, as though trying to impress the company president, replied with a shrug, “Oh, somewhere between sixty and seventy-five, I guess.” She smiled a power smile. “You can’t run your own business,” she explained patiently, “on forty hours a week.”

  I groaned inwardly, hoping my dismay didn’t show on my face. I felt the way I had when poor crazy Juanita Flumer had jumped up in the middle of her child abuse hearing and announced to the judge in ringing Old Testament tones that she intended to follow Abraham’s example and sacrifice her children to the Lord. End of hearing. Today’s disaster, while hardly that conclusive, was bad enough.