Santacristina suddenly furrowed his brow and then looked intensely at Marlene. “Maybe we were intended by God to meet,” he said.
“I’m always open to the possibility,” she replied. “But why do you say that?”
“Bear with me, as I have not thought this out entirely,” Santacristina said. “But Coach O’Toole, you said you were surprised at the lack of support from Huttington, someone you once considered to be on a friendly basis with, no? What might that indicate to you?”
“I see where you’re going,” O’Toole replied. “That somebody has something on Huttington and is blackmailing him to support Porter and get rid of me.”
Santacristina nodded emphatically. “Yes. And what if this blackmail ties Huttington to what happened to my daughter?”
“I guess that’s one possible theory,” Marlene said slowly, then shook her head. “But on its face, I think most people would say these are two unrelated events, and we’d only be guessing at a connection.”
“Perhaps,” Santacristina agreed. “Perhaps I am just a father driven mad with grief. But I believe it is true.”
“And you know what,” Marlene said. “Something in my gut tells me it is, too.” She looked at the other two men and thought of Butch. “The question is what can we do about it?”
Two hours later, Clyde Barnhill was about to call it a day when the telephone in his office rang. Sighing, he answered it.
“What in the hell is that Jew bastard doing getting involved in this?” said the voice on the other end.
“Hello, John,” Barnhill replied. “I told you before. The ‘Jew bastard’ knew O’Toole’s brother. They were roommates in college.”
“Yeah, so the fucking district attorney for New York just happens to take a case in Bumfuck, Idaho,” Porter complained. “You don’t find that a little coincidental? I don’t believe it for a minute. And now his wife is out here—hanging out with that Basque mother-fucker.”
Barnhill did not like Big John Porter, nor his idiot son. But they served an important purpose for his friends back East, and so he resisted the urge to tell him to stick it up his ass.
“Calm down, John,” Barnhill said. “We checked it out with friends in New York. Karp is on a leave of absence. He got shot but the shooter was not accurate enough. O’Toole obviously called him and asked for help. I wouldn’t worry about his wife, obviously just some bored housewife who wants to play investigator.”
“Yeah, and maybe you don’t know, maybe she’s working with Santacristina,” Porter said. “She and O’Toole and that attorney fella, Meyers, were about to mix it up with my boy and his friends when Santacristina showed up. That a coincidence, too?”
“I’ve said it before, John,” Barnhill replied, letting a little anger seep into his voice. “Your boy needs to lay low and stay away from those ‘friends.’ It draws attention to him right now and won’t look good if it gets into this trial.”
“Yeah, yeah, I’ve told my boy that he has to watch out for what he does in public. But he likes those fellas, and they, at least, treat him with respect,” Porter replied. “Tough to keep an eye on him 24/7.”
“I understand,” Barnhill said. “We just need to be careful around the woman. She’s the wife of the district attorney. If something happened to her, there’d be a lot of eyes looking this way.”
The phone went so silent that Barnhill thought he could hear the poorly greased wheels in Porter’s head grinding slowly. “Yeah, you’re right,” the big man agreed at last. “But nobody messes with my boy and gets away with it forever.”
If your boy was any dumber, Barnhill thought, he’d be a donkey, and not a very smart one. “Well, my advice right now is that we all sit tight. There are more pressing concerns than Marlene Ciampi.”
“I ain’t so worried about her,” Porter replied. “But like you said, she’s the wife of the fucking Jew bastard district attorney of New York, and that ought to worry everybody. If you know what I mean.”
“I know, John,” Barnhill said. “And our friends are monitoring the situation. Now go have yourself a nice Jack Daniel’s on ice, and I’m going home to do the same.”
“All right, Clyde,” Porter said. “And oh, hey, we going to get any huntin’ in this winter? We can use the Unified Church property anytime we want and no fucking game wardens to worry about.”
“Sounds like a plan, John,” Barnhill said. “I wouldn’t mind shooting something…I wouldn’t mind that at all.”
15
A STIFF BREEZE SWEPT DOWN THE CONCRETE CANYONS, STIRRING up old leaves and litter as the few tourists willing to brave the elements on a chilly Sunday evening to window-shop along Fifth Avenue pulled their coats tighter and tugged their hats down around their ears. Despite the cold, V. T. Newbury hesitated outside of the towering skyscraper as the sun slipped into the cloud bank somewhere beyond New Jersey. He’d been going in and out of the skyscraper most of his life, but the only reason he had was now gone, and he felt as if he no longer belonged there.
A sudden gust of frigid air slapped him in the face, like someone trying to get him to come to his senses. He considered turning around and taking a taxi back to his place in the Village, but taking a deep breath, he pushed through the revolving doors. Normally, they would have been locked on a Sunday, but not when Dean Newbury’s nephew was coming to visit.
As V.T. walked up to the security desk, the guard smiled and hooked a thumb toward the private Newbury, White & Newbury Only elevators behind him. “Good evening, Mr. Newbury, your uncle is expecting you,” the young man said pleasantly. “And by the way, I was sorry to hear about your father. A nice man. Always had time to ask how I was doing.”
“Thank you, uh”—Newbury glanced down at the man’s name tag—“David. Yes, he was a good man. I miss him.” Not trusting himself to talk about his father’s death without crying, he entered the elevator and pressed the button for the top floor of the seventy-story building.
The family firm occupied the entire floor—and that was just for the senior partners and their secretaries. The entirety of the next two floors below also housed the firm’s junior partners, as well as the foot-soldier attorneys, paralegals, investigators, secretaries, researchers, and, occupying a wing of its own, the all-important billing department.
When the doors opened again, V.T. stepped off the elevator and waved to the pretty receptionist at the front desk, who smiled and pointed toward the office of his uncle, Dean Q. Newbury, the impervious, flint-eyed, most senior of senior partners.
“They got you working on a Sunday?” he asked the receptionist as he headed in the indicated direction.
“If your uncle’s here, I’m here, Mr. Newbury,” she called after him.
V.T. hurried down the hall, but then slowed as he approached the office opposite his uncle’s, which had been his father’s for nearly fifty years. The door was open and the lights on, so he stepped inside.
It was a magnificent office, as befitted the number two partner of the nearly two-hundred-year-old firm. The entire office was four times the size of his quarters at the District Attorney’s Office. The furnishings were much nicer, too—soft couches and chairs done in light tan leather, with accents of wood around the library and the trim.
The main room was dominated by an ancient rosewood desk, said to have once been owned by George Washington when the ragtag Continental army was holed up on “York Island,” awaiting the armed might of the British Empire. There was also a full kitchen with oak countertops and a refrigerator on which photographs of V.T. and his mother hung from magnets. The walls were tastefully decorated with art, including a large oil painting of V.T.’s parents and himself as a five-year-old boy, enjoying a picnic on the beach at the family’s Cape Cod oceanfront house.
More photographs of the family were propped along the bookshelves, which were full of various texts. They weren’t just law books, either, but the sort of books a bright young son might choose to read during a visit to his father’s office while the
old man worked. Dickens’s Tale of Two Cities. A first-edition copy of Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises with the inscription “to my fishing buddy, Vincent, Warmest Regards, Ernest.” History books. Poetry books. Copies of the Bible, the Koran, and the Torah, plus treatises on Buddhism and Hinduism.
There was even a much-thumbed copy of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. Its hard use indicated that his father would have preferred a transient life spent in smoky coffeehouses, listening to Beat poets, to his penthouse suite and corporate law. But that was simply not an option for Newburys, for whom duty to the family firm was cast in stone—at least not until V.T. and his cousin Quilliam broke the mold.
As always, the most impressive part of the office to V.T. was the view of Central Park. The gray crowds of trees stretched away to the north in the dimming light outside, but within a couple of months would be leafing out, an oasis of green in gray old Gotham. Even in winter, the scenery before him reminded V.T. of how the contrasting views from his father’s and his uncle’s offices matched their personalities.
His father spent many of his lunch hours walking in the park; he called it “getting in touch with sanity.” Winter mornings sledding with his son gave way to summer mornings playing catch or taking a stroll with his wife while their boy wobbled ahead on a new bicycle.
Dean Newbury’s office, on the other hand, faced south. Still a fantastic view, but one dominated by edifices of granite, concrete, glass, and steel. Fitting, V.T. thought, for a man with the emotional capacity of a rock.
Then again, he knew that his father also had reaped the benefits of a big-money law firm without complaint. He’d never had to worry about how to pay the mortgage or send his son to the finest boarding schools and Europe for “fine tuning.”
His wife’s family, who were quick to remind the Newbury side that they could trace their American beginnings back to the Pilgrims, were wealthy New England bluebloods. But the Newbury family was richer still, though considered by their in-laws to be “newcomers,” having only reached America sometime around the Revolutionary War.
Neither side was known for its warmth. Public demonstrations of affection were frowned upon. But the New Englanders were puppy dogs compared to the Newbury branch. In fact, V.T.’s paternal grandfather, a one-eyed monster named Haldor, made Uncle Dean Newbury seem warm and cuddly as a koala bear. Not once could V.T. remember having received a pat on the head or a kind word from the time he was born until the old man’s death. In fact, his most vivid memory of Grandfather Newbury was how the family patriarch would follow him with that one eye as he walked past, like a vulture sizing up a dying rabbit.
When V.T. asked his father why Grandfather Newbury didn’t seem to like him much, his father laughed. So you noticed that, too, eh? he’d said. Don’t let it bother you, it’s just the way he is; he treated me the same, and I don’t think he knows any better.
The only person who ever really seemed to matter to Grandfather Newbury was Uncle Dean, who, V.T. gathered from his mother, spent much of his time after adolescence in his father’s company. But I daresay there’s little affection between them, she’d added. It’s more like they’re in business together. Just remember you have a mother and father who love you very much.
V.T. had considered himself lucky that he got his pair of parents.
While still patrician in many respects, they were odd ducks in their respective families, with all sorts of unsavory habits like laughing out loud and kissing in public. Their child was considered insufferably unruly—likely to speak before spoken to, and loud. But his parents ignored their families’ admonishments to take him in hand before it was “too late.”
When V.T.’s grandfather passed away there was a large funeral on what was a fittingly gloomy, misty day, attended by a host of severe, important-looking men and their dour, faded wives. But he couldn’t remember anybody actually crying except for his dad. The others simply stood or sat beneath umbrellas with their faces unmoving, as if set in stone. And when the brief service was over, they simply turned away, got in their limousines, and returned from wherever they came.
V.T. and his father were the last ones left at the grave site.
They’d stood there holding hands and looking at the casket as raindrops struck it and rolled off. The boy had looked up at his father and been surprised to see tears also rolling from his face. Good-bye, Dad, he’d said at last. I wish I could have known you.
With the passing of the old man, V.T.’s uncle had been next in line for what his dad called the throne…. And he’s welcome to it.
Dean Newbury was a chip off the granite block that was his father. He made it clear at every opportunity that his brother was a disappointment to the family and argued incessantly with him about taking on pro bono cases on behalf of indigent people or causes Vincent supported, such as Greenpeace.
One such argument V.T. overheard when he was twelve or so. It was one of the few times he ever heard his father raising his voice, and the exchange stuck. Pro bono, Dean, do you know what that means? For the good, Dean, for the good. I’m trying to save the soul of this firm, if there was ever a soul to be saved.
Dean Newbury shouted back. This firm doesn’t need a soul. What it needs are billable hours, big settlements, and huge fees. And senior partners who remember their responsibility to their family.
Damn this family’s responsibilities, Vincent shouted A murky tie to the past that for all I know was full of pirates and scoundrels, and now full of secrets that even its members are not privy to know.
The argument ended when V.T. poked his head in the door. The two men glanced at him, then glared at each other, before dropping the argument. However, V.T. got the clear impression that the battle was not over, merely postponed.
Like Haldor, Dean Newbury spent a lot of time with his son, Quilliam, particularly after the boy became an adolescent. But that, too, seemed to be a relationship that lacked any connection beyond that of proctor and pupil.
After Quilliam went away to college, V.T. only saw him at the obligatory family gatherings at Thanksgiving and Christmas, which were for the most part quiet, joyless occasions more for show than substance. It was easy to see at such times that the relationship between Quilliam and his father was growing increasingly strained, and they could often be seen off by themselves on the grounds, gesturing and arguing.
The final breaking point between father and son occurred when Quilliam refused to go to law school after graduation and instead joined the U.S. Marine Corps. In a private moment before Quilliam shipped off to boot camp, V.T., a freshman at Harvard, asked his cousin why he would join the marines with the unpopular war in Vietnam picking up steam. This family has always taken from this country and sacrificed nothing, he’d replied bitterly. Sooner or later, all bills come due.
Whatever bill he thought the family owed, Quilliam paid when he was killed by a sniper in Danang shortly after the start of the Tet offensive in January 1968. His body had been shipped home for services complete with a flag-draped coffin and a marines honor guard. At the conclusion, the honor guard folded the flag into a triangular bundle and tried to present it to Dean Newbury with the condolences “of a grateful country.” But Dean had turned away and refused to take it, so his brother Vincent accepted it from the confused marine sergeant.
V.T. had at first misinterpreted his uncle’s reaction as a political statement regarding the war. But when he saw his uncle’s face, the expression wasn’t one of sorrow or even bitterness over the loss of a son in an unpopular war. It was anger. Anger directed at the coffin. Anger at his son for disobeying. Later, when their eyes met at the reception hosted by his parents, V.T. got the distinct impression that his uncle was thinking: If someone had to die, it should have been you. The firm could have done without you.
That impression had gone a long way toward V.T.’s choice of law careers after he graduated and passed the bar. Not that corporate law had ever interested him, but he didn’t feel that he belonged at a family firm in which billa
ble hours became the litmus test for good lawyering, and whose leader couldn’t mourn the death of a son.
There had been plenty of tears at the funeral for V.T.’s father the previous month. But most of those were shed by Vincent’s friends and the employees of the firm who’d worked closely with him. Those in attendance from his mother’s side at least looked sad, but those who attended from the Newbury side were as emotionless as ever. And when the memorial service was over, they turned away, got in their limousines, and drove back to wherever they came from.
Most did not show up at the wake, which, V.T. thought, was just as well. They would not have understood or appreciated the tearful toasts to “a good man” and the laughter as various people related stories about his father, who, unbeknownst to V.T., had been quite the practical joker in college.
V.T. had spent much of the memorial service and wake in stunned disbelief. His father had complained of chest pain some ten years before, right after V.T.’s mother died. It turned out to be mild arrhythmia. He’d changed his diet and exercised regularly, and took digitalis to deal with any reoccurrences of the arrhythmia. After a recent physical, the longtime Newbury family doctor had pronounced him as fit as any octogenarian had a right to expect. But a month later, Vincent Newbury collapsed and died from a massive heart attack.
It had taken time to get over the shock, but V.T. had come to accept that his father had lived a long life and that old men sometimes died unexpectedly. He was just grateful that their relationship had been such that after the other mourners left the grave that day and he was alone, he hadn’t wished he could have known his father better.
More of a surprise when he thought about it was how his uncle had suddenly warmed up to him after his father’s funeral. It had started with invitations to lunch, at which Uncle Dean strained to be jovial and warm but, as he’d never had much practice at it, came off as stiff and phony. Yet, when his uncle kept trying, V.T. decided he was being too hard on the old man and decided to give him the benefit of the doubt. He even told his boss and friend, Butch Karp, that he had decided the old man, a widower, was feeling the end of his days and realizing that his nephew was the only real family he had left.
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