“Counselor?” Judge Segal seemed to think the game was tennis; he shifted his attention from Haskell to me as though watching a ball bounce back and forth. It was an attitude that matched the hand-printed motto he kept on his bench: A likely story. It was up to me to smack Haskell’s lob over the net—or into it. I hoped I’d be as good in my court as Dawn Ritchie was in hers.
“You’re right,” I said stoutly. “Terrell Hopkins could have copped that plea in his first appearance in Supreme, and that’s exactly what I as his lawyer advised him to do. But you’re wrong about why he didn’t. He’s not jerking the system around; believe me, he doesn’t care about the system. What he does care about is his grandmother. She’s not here yet, but she’s been in court every time the case was on, despite poor health. The trouble was, Terrell didn’t want to admit his guilt to her. He’s finally realized he has no other choice. It’s a hard thing for him to do, so it took him a long time to come to the decision to take the plea. That’s why he turned it down seven times—not because he’s playing games.”
Something in the judge’s face shifted subtly from wariness to understanding. For the first time, he looked at Terrell Hopkins and saw a person instead of a defendant. I felt a rush of elation, the same feeling I’d had on those magic nights when all the colored balls did just what I wanted them to do.
Judge Segal gave me a rueful smile. “Counselor,” he begged, “stop bleeding all over my bench.” Then he turned his attention to the DA.
“Well, Mr. Haskell,” the judge asked, “does this change your view? I have to admit, I don’t see the big difference between one-and-one-half-to-four and two-to-six. Either a little jail time will straighten this boy out or it won’t—and six extra months upstate won’t be the clincher.”
The DA had strict instructions not to come down, however, so the judge and DA left to reason with the DA’s supervisor on the chamber’s phone. I walked back to the defense table and sat down next to Terrell.
“What happenin’?” he wanted to know, his eyes wide with apprehension.
“We’re doing all right,” I answered. “The judge wants to give you a break, but he has to convince the DA’s office. I think we’re in good shape, though. The only thing I want to say is be sure to answer all the judge’s questions, Terrell. Tell the whole truth about the gun, the coat, everything. Okay?”
He nodded vigorously. “I done thought a lot about what you said yesterday,” he said softly. He wouldn’t look at me, but the words were clear and firm. “About not lyin’ to myself and all. About bein’ a man. I’m ready to do what I gotta do. That’s all I’m ready.”
The jukebox sounds in my head exploded in a shriek of dissonant glory. This time I’d really cleared the table. Not only because I’d turned three-to-nine into one-and-one-half-to-four, but because something I’d said had the power to penetrate Terrell’s thick wall of indifference. I felt as good, as much a winner, as I did when I heard those glorious words, “We find the defendant not guilty.”
We took the plea. Terrell stood tall and told the truth. No lies, no posturing. Inside my head, the mellow sounds of my mental jukebox put a glow in my eyes as I pictured my imaginary pool table. Even the eight-ball had fallen into a pocket.
My Zen-and-the-art-of-pool high carried me down the Henry Street hill toward the waterfront. The pale winter sun was low in the sky; I’d had a lot to do before I could get free to meet Lessek. I stepped around patches of dirt-blackened snow with a bouncy step that matched the music in my head. This time when Lessek and I faced off, I knew I wouldn’t be retreating in blushing embarrassment. This time I’d make him talk.
I passed Dorinda’s house, noting that the fancy restaurants that used the Brooklyn Bridge and the New York skyline as a decorative backdrop were setting up for dinner. I could see waiters placing intricately folded peach napkins at each place. Near the River Cafe—actually a barge floating on the East River—spindly trees decked with Christmas lights tried—and failed—to compete with the majesty of the Great Bridge.
Once around the corner, I was back in warehouse city. No decorated trees here; no trees period. Just cobblestones and dirty brick buildings without windows. Of course, if Lessek had his way, the whole waterfront would be gaily lit, full of fashionable people arriving by cab to expensive restaurants. The area would be shorn of its gritty reality, and of Dorinda and her artist friends.
I turned another corner, walked under the huge suspension bridge, then along the water to Lessek’s warehouse. As I approached, I noticed something strange. Instead of empty streets, their stark grayness broken only by a single red Ferrari, I saw a knot of people—and a police car.
My mind flashed back to the night I saw Linda’s body carried down my front steps. My heart began to race. Could Lessek be dead? Killed by the same person who murdered Linda? Had Ira Bellfield gotten fed up with playing Todd Lessek’s backstreet boy, taking the rap as a slumlord while Lessek drove his sports car to places like the River Cafe? Or had Elliott Pilcher been found out and fired, then taken his revenge on Todd Lessek for offering him what he’d been only too willing to take?
I realized suddenly that the answer was simpler than that. Who had been displaced and humiliated by Todd Lessek? Who had been driven nearly insane by the desire to hurt back? Who spent day after frozen, weary day trudging in front of the building, waiting for a confrontation with the man who’d ruined him? Abe Schine. My mind repeated the name as I ran along, my boots clattering on the cobblestones. Once I slid on the ice and narrowly missed falling, but my pace didn’t slow. What if this time, when Abe Schine stepped out of the shadows, he’d been armed not with eggs or creosote, but bullets?
I reached the edge of the small crowd just as the ambulance careened into the street, sirens howling and lights flashing. Stepping through the crowd, I tried to catch a glimpse of the figure under the blanket. I heard a couple of remarks about pushy broads and ghouls who like to watch accidents, but I didn’t care. I looked at the head as the figure was carried by, and only gradually realized that I was seeing not Lessek’s tight curls, but a bald pate with liver spots. The body on the stretcher was Abe Schine’s.
“Oh, my God,” I said, holding my hand to my mouth. Still picturing some kind of armed confrontation, I added without thinking, “They must have shot him.”
A black man in a thick wool hunting jacket said disgustedly, “Nobody shot nobody, lady. The man had a heart attack is all. Happens every day.”
“Yeah,” a voice behind me chimed in. “Especially an old guy like that. What was he doin’ out here anyway? Shoulda been home on a day like this.”
“Shoulda been at work,” a lady corrected scornfully.
“What work?” the black man challenged. “The guy was a bum, right? All he cared about was drinking cheap wine and sleeping it off in some doorway.”
I thought of the Royal Baseball Cap Company. Forty years of a man’s life called “a dump” by a young go-getter in a red Ferrari. A proud, hardworking man reduced to lone picketing and egg-throwing to salvage a little dignity. I had a lump in my throat as I watched the ambulance tear away, but all I said, in a croaking voice, was, “Is he dead?”
“If he ain’t now, he soon will be,” somebody snickered.
“He won’t make it,” the lady said confidently.
“Poor old geezer.” The black man with the Bronx accent gave the eulogy.
This was probably not the best time in the world to talk to Todd Lessek. I looked up at the flashcube penthouse, thought of Abe Schine’s red, chapped hands, and decided to go up anyway.
The cops were just leaving, being ushered out by a genial yet grave Lessek. He was shaking his curly head and giving a perfect imitation of a man who really cared that someone had just died in front of his building.
“… a terrible thing,” I heard him murmur. “Of course, the poor guy went a little bananas after he lost his business. I didn’t want to have him arrested for the egg-throwing, even if he did ruin a good suit, but hey, you can’t let people get
away with it, can you?” The uniformed officers agreed respectfully that you certainly couldn’t and stepped into the elevator.
Lessek noticed me before they left. I could tell because his eyes narrowed and he looked ready to bite. But a nasty remark to a female visitor might spoil the more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger tone he was determined to adopt, so I got a royal welcome in front of the cops.
“Ms. Jameson,” he boomed, extending a well-manicured hand, “how nice to see you again. Won’t you come into my office where we can talk privately.” Once again I followed Lessek through the high-tech movie set to his spacious cubicle.
Once the door closed, the welcome mat was hastily thrust out of sight. “What are you doing here?” he snapped.
“Sightseeing,” I answered. “Watching them take Abe Schine’s body away, for one thing.”
“Was that his name?”
“Jesus! You can kill somebody and not even know his name?”
“How do you figure I killed him, Ms. Jameson? Got inside his heart and stopped up his arteries?”
“You destroyed his business,” I reminded him. “Remember? Then you humiliated him. You—”
“I didn’t destroy anything that wasn’t already dead,” Lessek shot back. “I suppose he told you his sad story, all about the flood that ruined his baseball caps? Well, did he tell you about the competition from Japan, or the polyester caps he refused to make? That guy was the stubbornest man I ever met, Ms. Jameson, and if anybody destroyed him, he destroyed himself. I offered him good money for his space,” Lessek said indignantly, doing a creditable imitation of Paul Newman accused of something he didn’t do. “Top dollar. He could have relocated, or retired, like everyone else in this building. You ask Jack Pearl what he thinks of me. You ask Al Wong, the importer from the second floor. They took my money and were happy to get it. But not this Schine. With him, it was eggs, it was creosote, it was trouble. So …” He shrugged an eloquent shoulder. “He asked for trouble, trouble he got. Now, if that’s all you came for, Ms. Jameson …”
“It’s not,” I said, sitting uninvited in a tubular chair and crossing my legs. “I’ve been thinking about the last conversation we had, and I decided we had some unfinished business.”
His face took on the complacent smile I’d expected. “Do you really want to make a fool of yourself again?”
“Would I sound like a fool if I told you a friend of mine is keeping certain documents for me?” I kept my voice steady in spite of the surge of excitement that ran through me. “Documents that show you and Ira Bellfield are partners?” I paused and looked him in the eye. “I wonder,” I said idly, leaning back in the chair, “if Jesse Winthrop at the Village Voice would be interested in those papers?”
Lessek was shaken but still smooth: down but not out. He shrugged. “I suppose that bastard would print what you’ve got. Anything that creates jobs, he’s against. Him and that liberal rag of his.”
“You wouldn’t mind?” I asked sweetly, calling his bluff. “You don’t think some of your big investors would be bothered by the things you and Bellfield have done? You don’t think the city would drop you so fast—”
“I’ve got friends,” Lessek replied stubbornly. “I’m connected where it counts. The waterfront deal’s too big; nobody can stop it now.”
“Bullshit,” I shot back. If we were in George V. Higgins territory, I could speak the language too. “Deals like yours aren’t set till the cement starts to pour. The city can pull back any time it wants to, for any reason or for no reason. If that partnership stuff gets printed, people who are dying to be seen with you now won’t even return your phone calls. You’ll have this building because it’s yours outright, but all the rest …” I trailed off and waved a hand at the skyline view of the waterfront. “I wonder if Helmsley or Trump would like to take over the development,” I speculated, one eye on Lessek’s reddening face.
My fantasy had come true; my prediction had been accurate. This time Todd Lessek didn’t laugh. He reached into the pocket of his tailored jacket. It took me a minute to realize that the shiny metal thing he pulled out and pointed at me was a gun.
18
I sleepwalked through Lessek’s office, feeling its unreality closing in on me as we proceeded toward the elevator. I was wading, my leg muscles straining against the pull of powerful waves. The gun in Lessek’s pocket loomed on the edge of my consciousness like a hawk circling a rabbit.
We stepped out of the building into a blast of January cold. The sun was lower in the sky; the lights on the bridge cut through the late-afternoon gloom. The excitement was over, the crowd gone. I flinched as I felt the gun in my ribs, then walked mechanically in the direction indicated by Lessek’s empty hand.
We came to the pedestrian stairway under the bridge. In summer, it was filled with walkers, lovers holding hands, photographers, and people deftly hoisting ten-speed bikes up and down the steps. Now, not even the muggers braved the strong wind that sliced across the bridge from the silver river below.
We started up the stairs. I needed no further prodding from the gun; I simply walked.
When we reached the first stairs lifting us from the approach ramp to the actual bridge, Lessek halted, ordering me to do the same. I did, facing him with a stance of bravery I hardly felt. My knees were having trouble holding me up, and the cruel wind brought tears to my eyes.
“This is it,” Lessek said in a tight voice that strained against the wind. “Now we can talk.”
“Talk?” my voice was harsh with fear, a seagull’s cry. “Is that all you want to do?”
He nodded impatiently. “Of course,” he replied, “I just didn’t want to have this conversation where it could be overheard. My fucking office is a nest of wiretaps and bugging devices. Up here”—he gestured with his gun at the sweep of bridge, the famous Gothic arches, the luminous webbing of cables, the sunset glow of the Manhattan skyline behind us—“up here, nobody can hear what we’ve got to say.” Given the whistling wind and the steady hum of traffic on either side of us, I had to agree with him.
“I see your point,” I shouted over the din. “So what is it you want to say?”
“Let’s talk price,” he began, his voice cracking as he tried to lift it over a particularly vicious gust.
I threw up my hands, disgusted at being unable to hear. “Let’s go up the stairs,” I called. “We’ll be away from the traffic and we can get out of the wind.”
Lessek nodded his agreement and we walked, stiff-legged, up the stairs and along the windy wooden ramp that led to the Brooklyn pylon of the Great Bridge. By the time we reached the massive pillars, my forehead was clamped in a vise of cold, my nose was numb, and my eyes were teary. The calm of the windbreak caused by the pillars was a startling and welcome relief. So was the absence of the pistol Lessek had held on me; he must have pocketed it as we trudged along.
“That’s better,” I said, meaning both wind and weapon. It was far from warm, but the stone pillars, reaching up into their majestic Gothic arches, provided a refuge from the nasty wind-chill. What was more important, we could talk without shouting over the roar of traffic.
Now that we had our silent oasis, Lessek seemed curiously reluctant to talk. He looked into the distance, appearing to study the huge Jehovah’s Witnesses clock that dominated the Brooklyn side of the river. Behind us, an opalescent winter sunset was beginning to turn the gray clouds into mother-of-pearl.
“How much?” he asked abruptly.
I took my chance. “We’ll save the details for later. Let’s talk about Linda Ritchie.”
He made an impatient movement. “What about her?”
I measured him with my eyes. Gun or not, the only way to get what I wanted from him was direct challenge. Todd Lessek had no time for wimps.
“Who killed her, you or Bellfield?”
“What makes you think—”
I cut through the bluster. “You had the most to lose if Linda went public,” I pointed out. “The others had prestige on the
line, maybe even liberty. You had money, and lots of it riding on Linda’s discretion. And knowing her, she’d never let you forget it.”
“Ira could have done something impulsive.” Lessek was only running it up the flagpole; his eyes clearly showed he didn’t believe a word of what he was saying.
“That’s what I thought at first,” I agreed. “But Ira’s only got two personalities—he’s a wife-beater and he’s your back-street boy. So if he killed Linda, it was either a momentary impulse, or he was acting on your orders, which makes you an accessory.”
“What’s this ‘back-street boy’ stuff?” Lessek protested. “Ira understood the business. He knew there’s always a Mr. Inside and a Mr. Outside. I’ve got the personality and the head for finance. Ira doesn’t, it’s that simple. Could you really see him at Lutèce or La Grenouille winding up a billion-dollar mortgage?” Lessek laughed at the incongruous image he’d conjured up. “Ira knows what side his bread was buttered on,” he finished. “Even if his bitch wife doesn’t.”
“Norma,” I remembered, “the one who landed up in the Safe Haven with a broken arm.”
Lessek nodded. “Ira’s a fool where that woman’s concerned,” he said. “She nags him and nags him until finally, he can’t stand it anymore. He’d go crazy and hit her, she’d cry and sob until he’d beg forgiveness, and then they’d both jump back on the same old merry-go-round.”
I wasn’t about to play marriage counselor. “Norma met Linda Ritchie at the shelter,” I prompted.
“Christ, yes,” Lessek agreed. “God, I had to laugh when poor old Ira comes running in to see me, all bent out of shape because some broad is putting the squeeze on him over hitting Norma a few times. I can hear him now,” Lessek laughed, imitating Bellfield’s nasal whine, “‘Todd, she wants a job,’ he whines at me, ‘what shall I do? She says she’ll tell everybody about Norma if I don’t put her on the payroll.’” Lessek’s face registered genuine amusement. “Here’s a guy,” he explained, “who Jack Newfield’s calling the scum of the earth, who’s got angry tenants picketing him around the clock, whose name is a curse word in every ghetto in the five boroughs, and he’s worried about a little bitch who’s four-feet-eight in her stocking feet. ‘Ira,’ I told him, ‘let her talk. What can she do you?’”
Where Nobody Dies Page 17