The Good Lawyer: A Novel (37 page)

Casually and quietly I stepped down the second short flight still careful not to make much noise, but not concealing my movement either. I stopped at the bottom of the steps; Guevara’s apartment door was to my left, looming like an impenetrable wall. I stood there for an indecipherable moment, as if subconsciously wanting to make one last fearless gesture—pausing at the mouth of the beast.

A swishing sound came from inside the apartment. In an instant the door swung open.

There, before a darkened apartment, stood a man inside an outline of blackness. The whites of cobra eyes bore through the haze of the hallway light that swelled over the doorway. The eyes were still. The figure filled the doorframe.

It crossed my mind to run, except I believed as with as any wild animal that this would draw a quicker and more immediate response—a leap and a pouncing from which I could not escape. I pulled out the .38 and pointed it at my darkened nemesis.

In a jolt and a flicker of light the .38 went crashing to the floor.

I was on my back, straddling the doorway—my legs inside the apartment, my arms and torso in the hallway, a muscular black man on top of me.

I let go a precarious barrage of punches, twisting with each one in attempt to escape as the figure pressed down upon me. But it drew only hacking grunts from my attacker, who seemed intent on pinning me to the floor.

A large bicep forged itself against my chest. I turned to reach for the pistol. It was lying against the far wall several feet from my outstretched fingertips.

I felt myself being inched into the apartment. The face of the man was a dark blur as I writhed on the floor digging in my heels to stop the darkness from swallowing me whole.

My fingers clutched the doorframe. My attacker’s hands, which seemed too small for his thick arms and chest, attempted to pry them loose, while I kept landing ineffectual punches into a rock hard side and back.

The bicep moved closer to my windpipe. This man, this killer, was winning. I only hoped death would come painlessly, that I would ease into some eternal peace, a bright light guiding my way.

His head pressed into my chest. I felt a cap fall on my face and reflexively shook it off.

I looked up, aghast.

My attacker was bald.

Amid the fear and the panic and the fight for my life, it registered: the Spiderman—Guevara’s evil accomplice—one of Terkel’s schoolboys turned rapist and murderer—was murdering me!

The bicep had found my throat.

My strength was near gone. What little I had left was mere frightful adrenaline.

My hand slipped from the doorframe and I was pulled into the apartment.

For a second my right arm was free.

I pulled Sallie’s knife from its leather calf holster. The body on top of me, with the apparent instincts of a wrestler, reached for my free hand.

He gripped my wrist, but not before I cut deep into his leg.

A massive blow thundered down on my chest; his fist, in turn, smacked the side of my head.

Everything went dark. But I could hear. Hear my own death. Like prison doors slowly slamming shut in my head.

Chapter 73

I
was standing on straw legs, my vision a translucent glaze, a blur slowly morphing into clarity. I expected to see my stepfather-father, John Mannino, reaching out to me, guiding me through the mist.

My face was being slapped and hard. I was still in the hallway. Every part of my body ached, my head worst of all.

Rocco was holding me up.

In the doorway, lying on his belly, a bullet hole in his temple and a gleaming puddle of blood under his head, was the Spiderman—a white man with a black face I now easily recognized.

Sallie was on his knees wiping down the doorframe, wall and floor of my prints, careful not to touch the puddle of blood or the body. The gun and the knife he gave me were in his left hand. My cap was in his pants pocket.

“That man’s white,” I said hoarsely.

“He’s delirious,” Sallie muttered, while examining the gaping face of the dead man.

“Look behind his ears,” I blurted.

Sallie huffed and bent back the dead man’s ear lobe.

“Son of a bitch. He’s right.”

The man on the floor, dead as the devil’s messenger should remain—was Peter Guevara.

Shuffling of feet came from behind the adjoining apartment door. Murmuring could be heard on the floor below.

Sallie was the first to rush down the stairs. Moving with amazing quickness for his size, he yelled out from the third floor for the whole building to hear. “Anyone talks to the police, they’re fuckin’ dead! Your kids won’t be safe playing in the street!”

Rocco and I were behind him. Rocco was still holding me up, though I was walking, even running fairly well on my own. Outside, two cars were double-parked with drivers alert and ready. I recognized the wheelmen as two of the young soldiers from the club. The lead car was Rocco’s Caddy, no doubt used at great risk to the Brooklyn
capo
. The second car was mine. The license plates of both had been changed.

Sallie jumped in the front seat of the Caddy. Rocco and I got in the back. In minutes we were on the Major Deegan Expressway.

Even against the soft leather interior my body was racked with pain.

Midway over the Triborough Bridge the car slowed. Sallie opened his window. Like backhanding a discus, he flung a small metal object out the car and off the bridge. It was the .22 Rocco had used to shoot Guevara.

The car accelerated and we headed into Queens.

“You guys must be really pissed at me,” I said sheepishly.

The young driver’s attention did not waver from the road as he stayed just under the speed limit, but I thought I saw him smile ever so slightly. Sallie turned and looked at Rocco.

“Let’s just leave it that we’re happy you’re still alive,” Rocco said.

Sallie handed me a paper bag full of clothes. “Put these on and put everything you’re wearing in the bag, even the knife holster. Especially the knife holster.”

I did as Sallie commanded. When I was done we were in Astoria heading down Ditmars Avenue. Looming overhead was a rusted black iron bridge that looked as if it should have been junked years ago.

Rocco nudged me. “That’s the Hell Gate Bridge.”

We drove along the East River until we came to a desolate area just past the underbelly of the bridge. A large black sign read: NEW YORK CONNECTING RAILROAD and under it, in smaller letters: East River Arch Bridge.

The car pulled over to the curb. A piped railing ran alongside the East River separating the sidewalk from the rocks and the water. The cuffs on the pants Sallie had given me were dragging below loose fitting sneakers. The pullover sweatshirt fit fine, as did the socks. There was no underwear in the bag. The three of us stood alone by the railing. The Hell Gate Bridge, a blackened monstrosity, was high above us to the right. The Triborough Bridge was about a half mile to the left.

“This railing wasn’t here in 1955,” Rocco said pensively as he grasped the piped rail with both hands and stared out onto the water in the direction of Randall’s Island.

“See those currents,” Sallie said. “See them spinning. They’re fuckin’ vicious.”

Sure enough I could see three connecting whirlpools of water, the closest about thirty feet away, each about fifty feet in diameter.

Sallie had the bag in his hand filled with my blood-splattered clothes. After carefully eyeballing the street, the sidewalk, the area along the riverbank and Astoria Park behind us, he flung the knife into the center of the nearest whirlpool.

Rocco pulled the gun Sallie had given me out of the bag and showed it to him. They each let out a short chuckle. Then, like an outfielder throwing home, Rocco hurled the gun into the outer rim of the farthest whirlpool I could see.

Rocco was breathing hard as we walked back to the car.

He directed the driver to take us home, to my home, to Long Island. The Malibu, as if in tow, was directly behind us.

We drove along the Belt Parkway and past Howard Beach. Long Island and the Southern State Parkway were ten minutes away. The emotional numbness had worn off and I welcomed the ache in my left arm and neck—a reminder I was the one still alive.

I passed my fingers over the left side of my head. A lump was there the size of a walnut from Guevara’s last blow.

“What made you guys come after me?” I asked.

Sallie turned and hung his heavy arm over the back of the front seat. “When I mentioned to your uncle that you had taken the silencer, it tipped him off. And when you weren’t home when he called at a quarter-to-two in the morning, he suddenly got this urge to run up to the Bronx. I thought he was crazy.” Sallie looked apologetically at Rocco, then smiled as he said to me poignantly: “He’s been walking around with that bum’s pedigree since you gave it him. Rocco Alonzo may be many things, but crazy he’s not.”

Without turning around, Sallie added, “And Nickie? Next time you go to shoot somebody, make sure you take the safety off the gun first.”

11 A.M. Sunday morning. I awoke achy and bruised, but rested. After a light breakfast and a hot shower I joined Mom for 12:45 mass.

She was happy I did. I was happy I did also.

Receiving Holy Communion felt like a cleansing. Absolution though wouldn’t come until years later—until chapter and verse of my very own
Confession.

When I got home I packed one small fat suitcase to capacity and called a taxi to take me to JFK airport, where I bought a first-class round-trip ticket with an open return.

Flight 125 was scheduled to arrive at Hartsfield Airport, Atlanta, out of warm clear skies at 5 P.M. sharp.

And it did. And on time.

Epilogue

E
leanor and I spoke about Guevara’s murder only once, on a day it seemed nothing could go wrong—a beautiful day—the day I arrived in Atlanta.

We walked where I had walked with Carolyn, by a fountain in the rear yard along a cobblestone path.

Eleanor listened and I told her everything.

At first she was angry, then afraid. Finally she understood, and forgave.

I told her all about Uncle Rocco. But I had underestimated her. She had been suspicious long before. And what she hadn’t pieced together from the files at the Manhattan DA’s office, her father told her. He must have paid an investigative firm handsomely because he knew more about Rocco and me than either one of us could possibly remember or know about the other. Surprisingly, I wasn’t offended. It meant he took me seriously. He also did me a valuable service—he discovered there was nothing more between my uncle and me than the commingling of blood and an affection, he candidly told Eleanor, he could not measure.

And although our fates had entwined for one dark moment, Rocco had his life, and I had mine. But Eleanor had that all figured out already.

Upon my return from Atlanta I submitted my resignation to Sheila and left the practice of criminal law forever behind me.

Eleanor never returned to her apartment. Her clothes and personal effects were packed and shipped to Atlanta. Everything else, furniture and the like, were thrown away or given to charity. She never quite got over the loss of her good friend.

Rocco told Sallie all about Carolyn’s murder, omitting none of the details. Sallie listened, flashed back to 1955, and was sickened. When he heard that Ernest Leskey had finally surfaced after twenty-seven years, he insisted that he be allowed to “handle the matter.”

Two weeks after Guevara’s death a conflagration occurred at 6 Daisy Place in the Country Club Estates section of the Bronx. The house was leveled by a raging fire after one prodigious explosion that completely engulfed it in a cone of flames. Miraculously, the Jamaican nurse escaped unharmed.

Terkel was found the next day, face down, his charred and blackened body floating in the bay behind his house. Dead. Finally dead.

The fire marshal ruled the incident an arson of unknown origin, design and motive.
Case closed
. The following winter this same fire marshal, along with his entire family, vacationed in Costa Del Sol for a month—his wife having become the benefactor of a small inheritance from a gone, but not to be forgotten, distant Family member.

The body of Peter Guevara, in blackface, belly down in a puddle of blood, was discovered by police from the 50th Precinct just fifteen minutes after Rocco, Sallie and I left the building on University Avenue. Detectives arrived minutes after two uniformed patrol officers responded to an anonymous 911 call. Krebs was one of the detectives. He identified Guevara immediately, pulled off the black skullcap and made the Spiderman connection. Aside, however, from black camouflage cream found in a dresser drawer inside the apartment, there was no other proof linking Guevara to the serial rapes, and murder of the Brooklyn cop’s ex-wife and baby.

Three and a half weeks later a team of New York City sewer workers responded to a complaint of a blockage in the main line leading from the street to the apartment building on University Avenue. When the line was determined to be clear, a city employee went into the basement of the building and found under the main sewer cap a stone laden plastic bag held in place by a wrap of white twine, the end of which dangled outside the screwed on cover. Inside the bag were seven pairs of women’s underwear. Five were later identified as belonging to Spiderman victims. The other two were of unknown origin, no doubt owned by women who, for whatever reason, failed to report the crimes (or worse, whose bodies were never found).