The Good Lawyer: A Novel (34 page)

I grabbed the list and shoved it in his face. “Open your eyes goddamn it!”

He did, and with the look of a wounded deer begged me to release him.

“Look at these fuckin’ addresses and tell me if Guevara showed these apartments!” I was howling like a demon.

Tedeschi strained to see them, but the pressure of my hand on his neck made it impossible. I threw him back in his chair and in one arcing movement was around the desk with my knee in his chest and my hand on his throat.

“1705 Montgomery. 1435 Townsend. 2170 Walton Avenue. These sound familiar? You knew to the penny what he owed you. You knew what he rented. You knew what he showed.”

I released Tedeschi but stood inches away, hovering over him.

He flattened his shirt with his fingers and pushed himself back in his chair in an attempt to regain his composure. He looked past me at the wall. What I had done to him was criminal, but I didn’t care. I needed answers.

“2045 Webster Avenue. 1500 Southern Boulevard. Now tell me before I stick my fist down your throat and rip your fuckin’ lungs out. Did Guevara show apartments in these buildings or not?”

Tedeschi’s was sweating through his shirt above a washboard stomach. He was in excellent physical condition, but hadn’t the psychological or emotional make-up to fight back.

“Yes,” he said in a choked whisper, then coughed several times. “I’m—I’m not sure of the Webster Avenue address, but I can look it up, and call you. The others he definitely showed. I recall the addresses from the newspapers.” He spoke like a child begging for forgiveness. “The Webster Avenue address was one of them too. I’m sorry, I remember.”

I stepped back and patted his shoulder. “I’m sorry too. I’m not sure what came over me.”

He chuckled pathetically. “Justice probably.”

Chapter 69

T
he only stone left unturned was Terkel. Doctor Norris Terkel.

I said I’d visit, and as much as it ravaged my psyche each time I ventured back into the Bronx, I could not stay away.

It was Friday, and unlike the week that passed the weather forecast was rain, and lots of it.

Country Club Estates was in the Throgs Neck section, in the southeastern portion of the borough—where there were no subways, no large four to eight lane boulevards or concourses, no apartment buildings, and no blacks or minorities of color, except for maybe an Asian family or two—where large one family homes with lawns to the sidewalk lined the streets, all well kept, many right on the water.

The water was the East River and part of Long Island Sound. The Throgs Neck Bridge spanned the two, connecting Queens with the Bronx. I didn’t have to travel more than two minutes off its first exit to get to Country Club Estates.

I killed a man. I killed a man
. Terkel’s ramblings over the telephone the last time we’d spoken no longer seemed the product of a sick tortured soul, but a haunting epitaph, delivered by the murderer himself.

I would not go there alone.

My best friend Joey agreed to drive me in his new white Olds ‘98. I told him once I went into Terkel’s house, if I wasn’t out in twenty minutes, to come get me. AIDS or no AIDS, dying or not, I figured Terkel for one crazy fucker.

I rang the doorbell and was greeted by the same Jamaican attendant who’d let me in the last time I’d visited. She was wearing a white smock over a housedress.

I told her who I was. She remembered speaking to me on the telephone and seemed thoroughly pleased that I had come. As she grabbed her coat I realized why: She couldn’t have been more pleased to get out of the house.

“I should be back in about fifteen minutes,” she said. “I have to get somethin’ to eat.”

“Are you sure it’s OK?” I asked.

“Just tell him to keep the mask on ‘til I get back.”

“The mask?”

“The oxygen mask.” She giggled at my confusion. “Listen, if you’ve not seen anybody like this, dyin’ and all, prepare yourself. He’s an awful sight.” She patted my forearm. “And he’s in a nasty mood too. You may want to keep the visit short.”

“Has anyone else come to visit him lately?”

“Just Peter. Six months I’m here and he’s the only one come visit. You’d think he was losing his father the way he dotes over the doctor.” She pointed aimlessly at the house as she hurried out the door and down the marble stoop. “He’s in the bedroom in the back.”

I stepped in and closed the door behind me. The hardwood floor creaked under my feet. I found myself in a small dimly lit center hall decorated only with a cherry wood grandfather clock that made me jump as it bonged nine definitive times.

It was dark inside the house and beyond the silhouettes of cluttered furniture in adjoining rooms I heard a faint repetitive beep.

Surmising it was the digital pulses of a heart monitor I followed the sound to a darkened hallway that turned to the right, then to the left. A weakly lit candlestick wall sconce glowed in the darkness. At the end of the hall a bright light spilled from under a closed door.

The pinging blips of the heart monitor pierced through the darkness like a messenger. I could smell rot and decay in the air. I reached for the doorknob but at first could not bring myself to touch it, as if it too bore the seeds of a deadly infection and was going to bite back.

I turned a pearl handle that felt like a cat’s head, and pushed the door open.

Bright light cascaded under and over me and blinded me for an instant. From across the room a coarse rant bellowed out at me. “I told that black bitch I don’t want no fucking priest!”

“I’m no priest,” I said flatly.

Terkel lay with his upper body, what was left of it, propped up in a hospital bed. Several white sheets outlined an emaciated torso and legs that stretched ghoulishly to his skeletal feet.

The room was a solarium with a ceiling that curved down into a far wall and glass panels so clear one could not tell where the room ended and the bulkhead and blackened East River began. The heart monitor was behind the bed. Hanging from a metal rack were three plastic bags of yellow and clear liquid that dripped with melancholy regularity into a tube that fed intravenously into Terkel’s right arm. An entertainment center on wheels was but a few feet from the foot of the bed. A Beethoven symphony I heard repeated over and over in the movie,
A Clockwork Orange
, was set at a faint volume. Terkel was biting down with brown rotting teeth on the bottom of an oxygen mask that fogged up with each shallow breath he took.

I stepped closer.

His neck twisted toward me as his face contorted in a feeble attempt to focus. His head was completely bald, and on it, three blackened velvety spots stood in stark contrast to its ashen pallor.

The lights on the Bronx-Whitestone Bridge, miles in the distance, marked the outline of his bed before me. The air outside was quickly growing misty as the stars and the moon disappeared beyond an overcast sky. Rain fell, and the outer walls of the solarium filled with crystalline beads of water.

“I know you,” he said with a voice that grated like sandpaper. “You’re Mannino, aren’t you?”

I drew closer to him, within several short feet. If I had not known all that I did about him, I suppose I would have felt pity at this shell of a man scratching a last hold onto life. But all that swelled within me was disgust.

“You’re exactly as I suspected, exactly as described,” he muttered, as he arched his back slightly.

“As described by whom?” I asked.

“By Peter, of course.” He displayed a smile that reminded me of the dilapidated gates to the junkyard behind P.S. 92.

As rain drummed onto the solarium roof like hailstones, the Bronx-Whitestone Bridge all but disappeared. I thought of Oscar Jefferson for the first time since the drive over, as if before that moment I was there for some other reason I did not know. But Terkel knew why I was there.

“It was murder,” I said. “Why?”

“I know it was murder,” he answered callously. “I was the fucking murderer.” His right arm twitched as he spoke, not from the horrible disease but as a limited way of giving emphasis to his words. “And if you have to ask why, you are as stupid as you think you are smart. Asswipe lawyer.”

“It was an innocent life. You knew that.”

“If the life wasn’t innocent, it wouldn’t be murder now would it?” And he was right. I was stupid—for trying to reason with a beast.

“You know, you deserve to lie there like the sick bastard you are. You deserve to suffer.”

“Fuck you,” he growled, then pulled his head up off a yellowed pillow and screamed: “Why, I did the bitch myself!”

“If Oscar Jefferson was killed for being gay you should burn in the electric chair.”

Terkel laughed so hard I thought he would suffocate. His bony fingers tugged at the oxygen mask until the clear plastic cup fell over his mouth. I wanted him to die right there so I could watch, but in a quick swipe he pulled the mask off again and resumed laughing.

I had been walking backward and found myself just inches from the bedroom door. I had heard and seen enough.

Under the roar of pouring rain and inside a crack of violent thunder, Terkel cackled: “And give your Uncle Rocco my best.”

His words coursed through me like the jagged edged knife this maniac had once used. And I knew then that the “bitch” he referred to was Rocco’s young and beautiful Dorothy.

“Tell him,” he howled, “I especially enjoyed the last sweet taste of her bloody pussy.”

A lightening bolt of fear shot through me. Terkel was sitting up, arms in the air, head high, mouth open to the heavens and roaring wildly at the elements around him.

As if on cue the fluorescent lights dimmed and dimmed again, then failed completely. I turned and ran, smacking into a hall table and sending a porcelain vase crashing to the floor. I stumbled and fell in the darkness as Terkel filled the house with wretched laughter.

I flung open the front door and leapt down the marble steps, crashing into the wrought iron fence bordering the sidewalk. I fumbled for the latch and swung the gate open with such force it slammed against the post and bounced back only to slam shut on the cuff of my pants leg, which tore as I raced to Joey’s car.

The Olds’ lights were off but the engine was running and the wipers were swatting at the vicious rain. Joey’s eyes were closed, his head leaning back. The doors were locked and the radio was blasting. I slammed on the side window with my palm. Startled, he quickly opened the door and I jumped in.

“What the fuck happened to you?” he asked.

“Just take off,” I demanded.

As we drove away and Joey looked at me in silent amazement and awe, waiting for me to explain, I knew why Terkel despite his well-deserved pain and agony fought so hard to hold onto dear life.

Because as awful as it was, it was far better than where he was going.

Chapter 70

J
oey stopped at a liquor store on East Tremont Avenue. He bought two pints of Seagrams then ran into a deli and came out with a can of 7-UP. The soda remained unopened on the seat as we drank from separate bottles of rye and soared over the Throgs Neck Bridge.

In minutes I was lightheaded and pouring my heart out like a lost little schoolboy. By the time we got to Queens I had finished half the bottle and was sufficiently drunk. Joey listened and asked no questions. I only stopped talking to bring the bottle to my lips for another sip. Thoughts of Guevara and Terkel—spurred me on.

I passed out on the Oldsmobile’s front seat, dreaming I was in another one of my nightmares, until the rye churned in my stomach and I vomited onto a grassy shoulder of the Meadowbrook Parkway. When I was done Joey yanked me back into the Olds, and I passed out again.

When I opened my eyes it was 1:45 A.M. I was alone in the car outside White Castle Hamburgers in Levittown, Long Island. The two bottles of rye were on the seat next to me. Mine was three-quarters empty. Joey’s was nearly full. He approached the car, wiping his mouth with a napkin. When he got in he smelled of greasy hamburgers and onions. I thought I was going to be sick again.

“I couldn’t take you home like this. Your mom would have a fit. With all this driving around I built up an appetite. Since you left your dinner on the Parkway, I didn’t think you cared much to join me.”

“Just take me home, Joe.”

My mouth was as dry as clay and my tongue felt like cardboard. The liquor was well settled in my system and I had the sensation, even while seated, that I was losing my balance. I held onto the armrest as I caught, in a glimmer, the familiar sight of Hempstead Turnpike in East Meadow.

The car did a tailspin each time I closed my eyes. So I kept my head back and lids open, conscious of every blink, until Joey pulled into my driveway where red and pink azaleas in full bloom were swallowed by the darkness.

Joey helped me up the stoop where the glare of the living room lights made me squint. Mom appeared at the front door looking like she had been shaken out of a deep sleep. She was holding her hair down with one hand and her robe closed with the other. Under the porch light she looked much older than her fifty-nine years.