Hostile Witness (40 page)

“And the councilman paid for everything, isn’t that right?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well, you didn’t pay, did you, Reverend?”

“No, sir. The pulpit is not a place for prosperity.”

“Are you aware, Reverend, that the councilman met Miss Ashland, his mistress, at a crack house?”

Prescott leaped again to his feet as the murmuring rose. “I object, Your Honor. This is pure slander.”

“Mr. Carl,” said the judge, “is there a good faith basis for that question?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Proceed.”

“Answer the question, Reverend. Were you aware of that?”

“No, I wasn’t.”

“Are you aware that the councilman has put Miss Ashland up in a luxury apartment in Olde City with a sweetheart lease at far below market value?”

“No, sir.”

“Are you aware that during this trial he has slipped up to that apartment numerous times to visit late into the night with his mistress, Veronica Ashland?”

“No, sir, I was not.”

“Now, sir, adultery is against God’s law, is it not?”

“Yes. That is one of the Ten Commandments handed down to Moses on Mt. Sinai.”

“One of the big ten of God’s laws, isn’t that right?”

“You could say that it is one of the big ten, yes.”

“Like the prohibition against bearing false witness.”

“Yes.”

“And the Sixth Commandment is also one of the big ten, isn’t that right?”

“Yes sir, it is right there in Exodus, chapter 20, verse 13. ‘Thou shalt not murder.’”

“And someone who has so easily violated one of the Ten Commandments might just as easily violate another.”

“I can’t say that for certain.”

“But all of God’s laws are equally vital. I mean, you don’t preach it’s okay to violate some of the Ten Commandments and not others. You don’t preach, go ahead and steal, just don’t take the Lord’s name in vain, now do you?”

“No, sir, it is all God’s law.”

“And both adultery and murder, along with being against God’s law, are also against the secular law, isn’t that so?”

“I am not a lawyer, sir.”

“Good for you, Reverend, that puts you one up on the rest of us here. I have no further questions.”

As I walked back to my seat I had a panoramic view of the defense table. Chester was sitting calmly, his hands
clasped before him on the table, looking straight so as to avoid Jimmy’s stare. Jimmy’s face was dark with anger, his facial muscles moving like stung slugs beneath his skin. Prescott was in a desperate conference with two of his associates.

The battle had been joined.

Just before I sat down I noticed someone leaving the courtroom. It was Moore’s wife, Leslie, head high, posture erect, rushing out of there as fast as she could go.

THE FISTFIGHT STARTED
in the men’s room before spilling into the hallway. U.S. marshals, stiff and heavy, ears plugged, blazers flapping, lumbered over to break it up, but the ferocity of the combatants kept them at bay. Jimmy Moore had hold of Chet Concannon’s neck. Chester held tight to Jimmy Moore’s crotch. Their shoes slipped on the smooth tile floor as they struggled in silence. With their free arms they were flailing, one at the other, like hockey players. Chester landed a few mighty hooks into Jimmy’s stomach and then Jimmy butted him, a brutal contraction of the arm that left Jimmy dazedly swirling away and Chet bleeding in sheets down his forehead even as he maintained his death grip on Jimmy’s crotch. A photographer’s flash popped like a firecracker. The picture landed on the front page of the
Daily News
under the headline
COURT HALL BRAWL.

After the judge had dismissed the jury early for the day, once again admonishing them not to read the newspapers, and after he issued contempt citations, fining Chester and Jimmy each five hundred dollars and threatening both with jail if anything like that happened again for the rest of the trial, and after the bloodied Chester Concannon headed home in a taxi and the bowed Jimmy Moore stepped out of the courthouse bent over double, as if he had eaten a bad piece of pork, Prescott slipped beside me on the courthouse steps.

“Your client has been fired from the councilman’s staff,” said Prescott.

“Evidently,” I said. “But it was only a matter of time.”

“That’s right,” said Prescott. “Only for as long as the loyalty shown by my client to a subordinate would continue to impress the jury and keep Concannon in line at the same time. There’s no need for it now. It is my understanding that Concannon somehow obtained a copy of our expert’s jury survey.”

“You mean the one you had promised repeatedly to send me but never did?”

“Precisely. It is what Chester told Jimmy before their little burlesque broke out. How did he get a copy of it, hmmm? Do you know?”

“I gave it to him.”

“How did you get it, Victor?”

I shrugged. “I have my sources, Billy.”

He put his arm around my shoulders and squeezed hard enough for me to hear a crack. Looking the other way he said, “Don’t call me Billy again or I’ll snap you in two. There was a break-in at my office last night. Nothing was missing except that report. I requested the entire office be dusted for fingerprints. You wouldn’t mind giving us a sample of yours, would you?”

“I would, actually,” I said. “On principle, you understand.”

He let go of me. Like an injured ballplayer, I restrained from rubbing my shoulder.

Prescott said, “You really stepped in it today, Victor.”

“The day I stepped in it was that first afternoon when I walked into your office.”

“I would have thought you’d be grateful,” he said. “You were a nothing and I gave you the opportunity to be a something.”

“The opportunity to play your dupe.”

“Really now, Victor. What other role could you play? I’m very disappointed in you.”

“I am crushed,” I said.

“Yes, that’s right. I am going to crush you. You know of course that CUP is very dissatisfied with your personal attack on their chairman.”

“I assumed they would be.”

“They’ve forbidden Blaine, Cox to even think of hiring you.”

“I don’t need their stinking job,” I said with my best bandito accent, but it came out wrong, like a whine.

“And of course they’ll dispute your fees now.”

“I’ll get paid. I’m a lawyer. I’ll sue them if I don’t get paid. That’s what lawyers do.”

“Any judge will see the conflict of interest. How could you have expected CUP to pay for Concannon’s defense when his strategy at the trial is to betray CUP’s chairman? In fact, they have told me they are going to sue you for the retainer.”

“Good luck to them finding it. I’ve got nothing but debts.”

“Yes, we know. But still, judgments can be inconvenient things.”

I thought of Winston Osbourne and his sad overgrown fingernails. My eyes were involuntarily watering now. It was one thing to anticipate the firestorm, it was another to be in the middle of it. I turned away from him so he wouldn’t see tears. Across the steps I saw Chuckie Lamb staring at us, something strange and open in his face. He saw me looking at him and he smiled as Prescott dressed me down, but it must have been an off day for Chuckie because the normal quantum of malice in his smile was missing.

“The Bishop brothers have already begun to look for other counsel on the Valley Hunt Estates deal,” continued Prescott. “And my clients in the
Saltz
case have withdrawn their offer. Permanently. Trial is scheduled in two weeks.”

“We’ll be ready.”

“Ready to lose. You have stepped in it today, my friend, yes you have. Eye deep.”

He started walking down the steps, away from me, and then he stopped and turned. “After today, Victor, your career is dead. Gone. It has sunk from the weight of your foolishness. After today you might just as well go back to living in that crumbling house with that bitter old man, spending your days cutting lawns.”

Prescott’s lawn-cutting remark sent me to the bar. I found a place just a few blocks from the courthouse, a bar called Sneakers, and I figured it was a sports bar, but whatever it was I didn’t care. It was empty when I went in, dark, the mashy sour smell of beer, like a frat house the morning after. There was music playing, some throaty folksinger turned up too loud. The bartender was a pretty woman with a pug nose and freckles and a boyish haircut. I asked for a Sea Breeze. She looked at me funny and I shrugged and told her to send over a vodka martini while she was at it. When the drinks came I downed the martini with a quick snap and chased it with the Sea Breeze, and although the combination didn’t quite send me off to a tropical paradise as I had hoped it was fine enough for me to order another round.

So Prescott had learned even more than what was in the sad sheaf of papers in file 716. He had researched my lowly family history, my father’s lofty profession, he had spoken to my acquaintances, my friends, to Guthrie, that bastard. And of course there would have been the chats over lunch with his prep school mate Winston Osbourne, Prescott getting the lowdown on the greedy second-rater who had hounded poor Winston into desperation. How pathetic that even in his decrepitude, with his fingernails long and his hair stringy, Winston Osbourne was still more welcome at the club than I. But of course he was of noble
blood, scion of the Bryn Mawr Osbournes, and so it was squarely within the finest and oldest traditions of his people for Osbourne to lunch at the club with Prescott and plot against the Jew. And then Prescott, after researching the whole of my life, after drawing a detailed psychological portrait, after reviewing his information with the best minds of Talbott, Kittredge and Chase, after all that Prescott had decided to hire me, knowing,
knowing
that I would sell out. Was my weakness that palpable? Well, at least the bastard had me wrong, but at that moment, sipping the Sea Breeze, watching the pretty bartender make up my next round, at that moment I wished he had been right.

It was the flip side of the lawn-cutting remark that was killing me. Prescott was right. My career, in all probability, was dead. Beth had jumped a sinking ship and none too soon. Well, good for her. I mean, who was I to think that I could pull off something as audacious as this? I didn’t have the power or the skill or the balls for it. I had chosen to take the opposite tack of my father and, with the inevitability of farce, that choice would lead me right back to the dark crumbling bungalow in Hollywood, Pennsylvania, or someplace very much like it, where I would spend my life sitting alone in a big faded chair, watching TV, hacking my lungs out into a paper towel, cursing myself for what might have been. I was not made for noble sacrifice or for the hard work of self-making. Let the Philip Marlowes of the world sit in sad satisfaction of their nobility. I didn’t want to be noble anymore, I wanted to be somebody, and for guys like me it was one or the other.

The bartender placed the drinks in front of me and I smiled at her. I took a sip of the martini, letting out a sigh when I was finished.

“Woman trouble,” she said to me with a knowing smile.

“How could you tell?”

“We get that a lot around here.”

“I bet you do,” I said.

Veronica and her whippet body and her thrilling insatiability. I took a gulp of the Sea Breeze. I had never before met anyone like Veronica, she had taken me someplace I didn’t know I could ever find. What had I meant when I said I loved her? What was the nugget that still lay in my chest? I had never felt about anyone else what I felt about her, but was that love? It was more like a thirst, a deep desperate thirst. I took another gulp and felt it even more strongly. I wondered whether Tony Baloney might have been wrong about everything, whether I might have jumped to the wrong conclusions, but even as I let my mind play with the thought I knew better. The cash withdrawals, the way she grew more harried as the evening aged, her kicking me out of bed every night so she could take care of her other needs in private. The wild greasy smell of her hair as she let herself go. She had told me half her story and I could figure out the rest. She had been hooked in Pakistan, cleaned up in Philadelphia by Jimmy, hooked again somewhere, and I was pretty certain where. There was a weakness to Veronica, a softness where she needed to be steel. You could see it in the way she drank, in the way she screwed. There was a need for indulgence that could never be satisfied, no matter how hard she tried. I figured she was up there now, in her apartment, desperately trying to figure out what to do. Jimmy, I’m sure, had called, warned her about what was happening. She was fluttering around her apartment now like a trapped bird. But I had something for her, something that would settle her down. I just needed a few more drinks to get up the courage to slip it to her.

Two women came in, nice looking, sharp-eyed women, women with faces that said they cared about politics and literature and saw the latest movies. That’s what I needed, someone to bring me back into the world, someone like Beth. We could go to plays, the ball game, discuss the
President and the budget and the Middle East. We could curse out Newt Gingrich together. Life would be just so grand. Veronica was not of this world, she was of her own. There was something sad and lost about her, something unconcerned. Maybe it was the accident outside Isfahan she had told me about, the van twisting down the slope, the fragility of life pressing itself over her face like a damp, smelly pillow. It was enough to drive anyone out of the present and that was precisely what it had done to her. But I wasn’t going to follow anymore.

I waved at the bartender and she placed two more drinks before me. I was getting drunk and it felt good. Another woman walked in and eyed the place. She was heavy, dressed in jeans and flannel shirt, but with a nice ponytail. I always thought ponytails were sexy. Like back in high school, well, not my high school, Archie’s high school. Ponytailed and overweight, what more could I want? She would keep me rooted, I thought. A ton of fun, yes. Someone like her. Jesus, I was drinking too much, but it felt so good. What the hell? It was a Tuesday, no court for another thirteen hours, plenty of time to prepare my cross-examination of Jimmy Moore. He was to be called tomorrow to testify in his own defense and he would bury Concannon. And what could I do about it?
Gornisht.
That was what was so sad about the whole thing. Even as I gave up everything I ever wanted, it wasn’t going to do Chester a bit of good, it wasn’t going to make the kind of name I needed to make for myself. Clients don’t come roaring in to losers. Maybe I could call Prescott, tell him I was sorry, that I would go along, but to give that prick a victory, shit, I’d shoot him first.

Two women came into the bar with matching black leather jackets. Epaulets, belts hanging, zippers on the sleeves. Yes, tie me up with those jackets, wind the sleeves around my chest. One was pretty, one was not, I didn’t care anymore. Tie me up with your leather, sweetheart,
bind my arms and legs, flagellate, flagellate, dance to the music, tie me up and I’m yours. I downed the martini in front of me. What was that, my third, fourth? And then the Sea Breezes on top of them. Maybe Veronica was waiting for me, maybe she had been calling. I could use it tonight, yes. A few kisses, a few tweaks of those gorgeous nipples, and then slip it to her, that would be something.

One of the black leather jackets sat down at the bar beside me. My poor luck was holding, it wasn’t the pretty one. She was thin, angular, her chin sharp, her hair like a sloppy Dorothy Hamill. And what was that on her cheek, that thin white line? It was a scar. Oh, God, now that was sexy. Maybe my luck was changing, a leatherclad vixen with a scar on her cheek.

She leaned on the bar and faced me. “Enjoying the view?”

A line, I thought. What I needed to do was to give her a line. My thinking had grown thick, but I could come up with a line, at least. “It’s fine,” I said. “It just got better.”

“Well, that’s good,” she said bitterly. “We just love to provide an evening’s entertainment.”

What had I done now, I wondered. I didn’t understand what she was saying. Maybe she was for sale, but if so she was a strange looking hooker.

The bartender came over. “Back off, Sharon, we’ve talked about this before.”

“I’m just sick of the gawkers,” said Sharon.

“That’s not why he’s here.”

“Then tell me, J.J., what is he doing here?”

“He came in for a drink. I can tell the ones who are here to look.”

It dawned on me then. It came close to clarity, a thought just hovering out of reach, and then slammed into me.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I thought it was a sports bar.”

“You got to change that name,” said Sharon as she slid away from me.

“I was wondering where the televisions were,” I said.

“Let me get you another round on the house,” said J.J.

“Maybe I should get going.”