Needles

by William Deverell

  “Yeah,” said Harrison, “he’s a good lawyer, but you can beat him.”

  He’s going for my pride, Cobb thought. Honcho Harrison understood trial lawyers: the good ones are driven by their egos.

  M. Cyrus Smythe-Baldwin, now nearly seventy years old, had always demonstrated a deadly precision in locating the jugular in the crown’s case. He had had the clear edge on Cobb in the half-dozen occasions they had paired off — something like five to one, Cobb admitted to himself, galled. But Cobb loved the old man. Thirteen years ago he had pried open the gates of the legal profession and got Cobb inside. Newly graduated from law school, Cobb had learned that his criminal conviction — for robbing a service station for cash to buy a fix — might deny him the right to be admitted to the bar. Smythe-Baldwin, laughing off Cobb’s attempts to pay him a fee, convinced the benchers of the Law Society that Cobb had accomplished a miracle of rehabilitation. Cobb was in fact off drugs at the time, and he stayed off for thirteen years.

  Six weeks ago he had gone on the wire again.

  Harrison, sensing victory in the silence at the other end of the line, stalked his quarry. “If you want a big win over the old man, I got just the vehicle. Front page. Good start for a good lawyer just getting his practice off the ground.”

  “Clients don’t take cases to famous prosecutors,” Cobb said.

  “That’s bullcrap. Smart crooks with money look for class. They know lawyers are all pimps who don’t give two tiny turds where their money comes from. Smart crooks hire pimps with class. You got class.”

  “Thanks,” Cobb said. “I needed that. I’ll look at the file, and I’ll promise nothing.”

  Relentless, Harrison said: “I’ll bring them up before I go off shift — witness statements, record, bail transcripts, exhibit lists, police reports, the whole pisseroo.”

  “Okay,” Cobb said. “I’ll send out for the ice.”

  He hung up, stared at the telephone for a long moment, then opened the impaired-driving file, which his secretary had brought him, and began to read the summary of evidence. But his unresisting mind ambled slowly off to the trial of Dr. Au P’ang Wei. Could he do it? With his high-wire shakes, could he handle it?

  Cobb knew the fundamental truth about junk, a truth all junkies keep in their hearts: once wired, you can never get free. You can stop using; you can lay the spike aside for years. But you’re never free. The wire keeps you hooked until the day of your death.

  Friday, the Seventeenth Day of February,

  at Half-past Ten O’Clock at Night

  “This,” said a despairing Cobb, flinging the files on his desk, “is a poor pile of manure.”

  Harrison merely smiled. He was used to hearing lawyers carp. He felt he had served up Dr. Au on a silver plate, dressed and done to a turn.

  “Do you think a jury is going to give us a conviction for this pigswash?” Cobb asked with a theatrical flourish of his arms. He was drunk. Honcho Harrison had brought a quarter of Johnnie Black with the files as a bribe. That bottle had gone dry, and the two men were working their way through Cobb’s Ne Plus Ultra, kept for entertaining important clients, should any pass through his door.

  “We’ve got a butchered body hanging from a meat hook, with his tongue and nuts cut off — the jury’s going to have a collective coronary — no fingerprints, no motive, no physical evidence that Au was there. . . .”

  “He owns the buildings. Rents it out. He’s got a key. We got witnesses.”

  “You have two witnesses, bless their law-abiding hearts, one blind and the other deaf. They see Au’s face in the window. I’m expected to ask a jury to put the guy away because his face was in the window? Aw, come on!”

  “Charlie Ming. We got his written statement. He and the Surgeon pick Jimmy up at home, take him to the butcher shop.” Harrison, a tall, red, and round-faced man of fifty-seven, was beaming and confident.

  “He doesn’t see fuck all,” Cobb shouted. “He’s off getting a mop and pail, comes back, no sign of Dr. Au.”

  “Well, we picked Charlie up right away, got a statement.”

  “A retard tong gunman: our best witness. And now Au’s got to him somehow, and he’s turned tail on us, claims his statement was false, made it because he was scared of a certain homicide cop.”

  “Aw, they always come out with that kind of bullshit,” Harrison said. Cobb turned his eyes to the ceiling and snorted. “He’ll come around before the trial, don’t worry,” Harrison said.

  “Au will give us the finger; and walk out of court whistling ‘So Long, It’s Been Good to Know You,’” Cobb mumbled. “What else have we got? A telephone tap — you said there was wiretap. I don’t suppose we have the Surgeon on the phone naively planning a killing.”

  “There was a problem about the wiretap,” Harrison said. He had not been able to pry a transcript loose from city narcotics. All Harrison knew was that the taps came after Jim Fat’s death, and Au was mentioned in them. The tap was placed by the city police, and Cobb assumed that the secrecy had something to do with the close-to-the-vest poker game that city police liked to play with their competitors, RCMP narcotics.

  The night’s business done, Harrison took Cobb home, recklessly driving with courage given by drink and by the knowledge that every traffic cop on the street was terrified of him.

  Harrison watched Cobb sway up the walk to his front door. He sighed, and drove off. Well, sure, he thought, it’s a tough case. But then, Foster Cobb, he figured, was the toughest courtroom tactician on the Coast, a sharp cross-examiner.

  There was only one problem. And it could be a great mother of a problem: Cobb was carrying a monkey again. Inside Harrison’s jacket pocket was the silver coffee spoon he had picked up from the floor of Cobb’s office.

  Harrison figured he might take it to the lab tomorrow to have it analyzed. Just to make sure.

  The monkey was first introduced to Cobb when he was sixteen, a high-school student. An older student, Paul Quade, contemptuous of others’ weaknesses, turned him on, gave him his wings, in the language of the trade. Cobb was unsure about doing it, but he had no choice. It was a matter of confirming loyalty, proving virility. Two girls looked on, giggling and thrilled, as Quade heated up some junk in a bottle cap and loaded a set of works. The heroin hit Cobb with a whoosh, and, embarrassingly, he threw up. But a few seconds later he was blasted, flying, omnipotent, free.

  After that, Cobb did up when he could, using hard drugs as a high, as a trip. For a while he merely chipped, still hanging out with Quade and a few other young braves. The chemistry of Cobb’s body was slow to form the mysterious compounds that create the dependency effect. To get a better rush, Cobb began to shoot in the mainline, and by the time he was in first-year university it dawned on him that he was wired. Hooked. Full on the spike.

  His connection found him a part-time job as a short-order cook and waiter in a greasy spoon where addicts hung out at night, drinking beer and smoking reefers in the back booth and cranking heroin in the washrooms. He became a part of the scene, fixing friends who were too dozy to shoot themselves in the line, banging them in the arm in exchange for a free hit for himself.

  Benjamin Bowness was twenty-one then, a few years older than Cobb, and they became sidekicks. They would sit together, bullshit, get loaded, then tear around town.

  Soon, there wasn’t enough junk being laid on Cobb to satisfy his thirsty bloodstream, and he started to listen to Bones’s brave talk about how easy it was to make a big score. One night, fearless with dope and vodka, they hit a service station for seven hundred and thirty dollars and change. Bones held the unloaded gun, and Cobb scooped the till. Twelve minutes later a traffic cop pulled Bones over for running a light, and found the money and gun in the glove compartment.

  Cobb was eighteen, and the magistrate let him off with a sentence of four years. They put him on methadone and weaned him from it in jail, and he go
t parole after fifteen months. He went back to university, completing his arts degree in the daytime while managing a pool hall at night, often doing shifts in the back room to relieve the boss, a friend and rounder who ran poker games there. Enthralled by the study of history, he expanded his major into a master’s degree, and entered law. He had quit his job at the pool hall, but by now was skilled enough at cards to be able to parlay his way through three more years of university.

  Cobb was hired into the prosecutor’s office, and for some months was put on show as a kind of symbol of the rehabilitative process. He discovered he had a gift for the courtroom. He could use words well and argue persuasively. An addict now for history, he enjoyed digging through old casebooks for buried ancient precedent. He grew fond of law’s fragmented logic. He learned how to assess the humor of judges; he learned their weaknesses, prejudices, and strengths. The legal community soon forgot his past.

  Four years after joining the prosecutor’s office, he met, wooed, and married Deborah Fletcher.

  He met her through her father — a law professor then, and now a judge, a man of erudition and culture, and the first strong male figure in Cobb’s life since his own father died when Cobb was a boy. A deep affection grew between the two.

  Deborah was eighteen then, a prize-winning skier with a supple, athletic body. She was red-haired and strong-featured, her eyes hot and darkly green, her mouth expressive and full. Before her, there had been casual encounters and short romances. No one seemed special to him. But Deborah Fletcher blew his mind.

  And she was infatuated with him: he seemed burned raw by life, mature, and deep. Her first impression of him — as her father’s dinner guest at home — was as a tall blond man, loosely strung together, with pained eyes that seemed to cut through her.

  She gave him a ski lesson one weekend. They went for drinks. And he seduced her with his mystery, his cool, his theatre: rounder-turned-prosecutor. In a borrowed ski cabin they made a fire in the fireplace and love on the rug.

  A month later they married.

  And now it was all coming apart.

  The seams had started showing about three months ago, and it was unravelling faster day by day. She wanted excitement in her life. He was content to smoke his pipe and watch his hockey games and read his books. She wanted to disco. He wanted tickets to the chamber-music season. Those were symptoms. Cobb didn’t understand what lay beneath.

  Their home — a twenty-fifth storey condo near Stanley Park — had now become an arena where Cobb and his wife staged caustic and sulking duels. The separate bedrooms frequently were separately occupied.

  And Cobb, six weeks ago, had bumped into an old acquaintance on the street. One Bennie Bones, who had painkiller, medicine for the heart.

  Cobb began to find his orgasms in the pit of his stomach, where the mainline rush is felt.

  Cobb lurched into the apartment, feisty with liquor and ready for battle.

  Deborah called out: “Did you bring the coffee, bread, and milk?”

  “I am doing a murder,” he announced.

  “Legal aid? Or do you get paid something?”

  “Deb, it’s a hell of a case. Dr. Au. The Surgeon. He slashed an informer’s throat. I’m prosecuting it.”

  “Did you,” she repeated, “bring the coffee, bread, and milk?’

  “Goddamn you, Deb!”

  “Cobb, you are drunk.”

  Corporal Everit Cudlipp marvelled at his beautiful waitress’s ability to achieve repeated deep orgasms, and he felt powerful as her lover. Alice Carson came once again, then clung to Cudlipp, holding him inside her. Her hair was dark and very long, and was sprayed across the pillow and over her face. It was a pretty face, but the nose was perhaps too small, the eyes calculating and not kind.

  Cudlipp knew Carson had been a prostitute some years ago, when, as she admitted to him, she had had to live by using the tools that God had granted her. Cudlipp was forgiving. She had repented her past, and it would be replaced by a future as Mrs. Everit Cudlipp, a future hopefully to be found in South Australia. The burden of his debts was off his shoulders now, but there was one last score to make before he quit the force.

  “Make him pay big, T-bone,” she whispered hungrily into his ear. “Tell him a hundred and fifty. No. Bullshit. Tell him two hundred. Two-fifty. I’d be worth another hundred thousand. I’d be good.” She bit his ear lobe until it hurt . “I was serving. You had a T-bone steak. I remember.”

  Cudlipp merely grunted. He did not like to talk after having sex.

  “Don’t go cheap, baby,” she went on. “Make him pay. He has to pay. You can sink him, baby. You can do him in.”

  Yeah, he thought, I can do him in. I set the price. He looked into her eyes. She was almost too smart, and that made him a little uneasy. For a woman, she had a hell of a business head.

  “We’ll have a little cocktail bar in Adelaide,” she whispered. “I can run it single-handed. They brew good beer in Australia. You’ll be my best customer.” She worked her tongue into the interstices of his ear, and felt the little hairs there.

  “Hey, that tickles. Get out of there.”

  “Just trying to get you going, T-bone.”

  “Jeez, Alice.”

  “Not man enough?”

  “Just give me a minute, damn it.”

  “Tell him two-fifty. Maybe he’ll settle at two.”

  He looked hard at her again. Real smart head on her. For a woman.

  Dr. Au P’ang Wei stroked the silky hair of Prince Kwan, his favorite Persian cat, with whom he felt a kinship. The chair upon which they sat was a Louis Sixteenth, gilded and softly plush. Red velvet curtains with a thick napped surface shut his room off from the outside, and there was time and solitude for reflection.

  A matter somewhat bothersome: it has been suggested that there were witnesses. But who? Some effort must be made to find out who they were. It must be done quickly; the trial was three weeks away. Perhaps some work could be performed by Mr. Plizit. . . .

  A slight pain drifted across his eyes, and he pinched a point in his left ankle along the gall-bladder meridian, which travelled to the cortex. The pain disappeared.

  Another problem: Old Ma Wo-chien had sounded petulant on the phone. Were there conspiracies in Hong Kong? Are they envious of my success here? Why had he asked about my health?

  But there is work to be done. Eastern Enterprise III, out of Taipei, was due at Centennial Pier at noon tomorrow, and there would be three and a half pounds of number-four white aboard, which must be sent immediately to the back end.

  So: there were impositions always upon his time, and there was so little that could be spent with Prince Kwan, his brother in spirit.

  Wednesday, the First Day of March,

  at Eleven O’Clock in the Morning

  Cobb was straight now. He had fixed an hour ago and was working quickly and easily now, putting together a synopsis of the evidence of witnesses he had interviewed. The phone rang.

  “Hello,” he said.

  “Hi. I’m Ms. Tann.” Unmistakably: Miz. “I’ve just joined the prosecutor’s office.”

  “Yes,” Cobb said. “Ed Santorini told me. We haven’t met.” That seemed unnecessary to say.

  “Let me warn you, I’m as green as a bean. I mean, I was called to the bar only six weeks ago. But don’t panic, Mr. Cobb, I’m full of go, and I’ll learn.” The voice was lilting, almost gushy. Cobb groaned inwardly. He prayed she was not a gusher.

  He frowned resentfully at his telephone. “I am sure I will enjoy having you work with me,” he said in his most formal manner.

  “Well,” she said, “I am sure I will enjoy having me work with you, too.” Now that sounded like a typical bit of female sarcasm.

  Damn! Cobb thought. Santorini — some form of practical joke? — had sent him a courtroom virgin.

  The Au case, wi
th its cruel letting of blood, was no place for a faint heart, and Cobb had hoped his assistant would be competent, tough, professionally distant, capable of working late hours and sharing hard liquor. Well, he would have to resign himself.

  “I guess you had better get to know the cast of characters,” Cobb said. “I will want you to read over the file.”

  “I read it last night,” Tann said. “The boss gave me the file copy. I don’t know that much about it, but it could be a little tough.” It was said as a question.

  “It’s tough,” he said.

  “The man, this Au, is a heavy-duty operator. Is he nuts? He collects them, doesn’t he? Nuts, I mean. Not meaning to sound crass. Do I sound crass? I’m sorry. But he sounds like he has a . . . what . . . a fetish? Will he go down on this one, do you think? Can we nail him?”

  She had a breathless way of talking, and did not leave much space between her words. Cobb would have to live with this for about three weeks. He had a picture of her: a babbling, bright-eyed innocent with an over-large mouth.

  “We need to fill in some gaps before I could be confident of a conviction,” he said. “We don’t have a knife to put in his hands, but we should be able to get him into the building where the killing took place. The meat market. The trouble is, in addition to Au and Charlie Ming, there was a third man involved, maybe a fourth, and right now I’d have to say there may be reasonable doubt as to who killed Jimmy Fat. So there’s a big piece of evidence missing. We have an outside chance.”

  “What sort of outside chance?”

  “Well, we’re going for the bomb with the clock running, and it’s third and ten on our own twenty.”

  “Third and what?” She did not sound like a great outside receiver.

  “We have just over a week to get this case into shape. If we get all our witnesses together, if old Mr. McTaggart and the Loo kid come across, if Charlie Ming tells the truth, if we can force Dr. Au onto the witness stand and stick it to him in cross-examination, if we get some rulings from the judge — well, if all of those things break for us, we might pull it off.” But Cobb knew he needed more than these. He needed direct eye-witness evidence of Dr. Au wielding the murder weapon. As far as Mr. Justice Horowitz was concerned — well, he would display an even temperament, would lean neither way, and would rule fairly on questions of law. He would be affable and gentle and would seek compromise on issues of evidence.