The Last Good Day (40 page)
Having seen the conversation ending, Dr. de Groot came out through the glass doors and passed Paco on the lawn.
“Heh, heh.” The doctor pulled back his lips as he ambled over, showing broad purplish gums. “A little off-duty consultation?”
“Yep. Crime never sleeps.” Mike blinked back the tears of nausea.
“You guys must be working around the clock these days. Awful about Sandi Lanier. She was in my wife’s book group, you know.”
“Yeah.” Mike dropped the hammer to his side. “I guess I did know that.”
The doctor was an orthopedic surgeon with Nutty Professor glasses and surprisingly crooked teeth. His wife, Dianne, was that flake who wore her hair like Pippi Longstocking, coordinated her outfits to match what the kids were wearing, and blasted Britney Spears and ’Nsync from her Blazer every time she went to the supermarket.
“Listen, Mike, we’ve been having some second thoughts about the fence.” Air passed loudly through the doctor’s septum.
“What?”
“We’ve been thinking we might want to put money toward upgrading our security system instead.”
Mike looked over at the fence post he’d left leaning like the Tower of Pisa. “Where’s all this coming from?”
“Look, Mike, I want to be honest with you. We have some concerns. I should’ve called before, but I didn’t know you were coming today.”
“Concerns?”
“Dianne already heard from somebody at the School Board that you were having a problem with the police department. Apparently there’s going to be some kind of disciplinary hearing?”
“Yeah, what about it?”
The hammer pulsed in time with Mike’s swelling thumb.
“Perhaps it would be better to put off finishing the job until everything gets cleared up.”
“Put it off? I’m not sure I understand,
Dick.
”
“Heh, heh.” Dr. de Groot made a wheezing sound as he eyed the hammer nervously. “Mike, you have to understand. It’s a difficult position we’re in. I’m at work all day, and my wife would be alone in the house while you’re working here. I’m sure you can appreciate how awkward that would be.”
“So she asked you to speak to me?”
“Mike, would you mind putting that hammer down while we’re talking?” The doctor pursed his lips. “It’s making me a little uncomfortable, and I’m sure that’s not what you want.”
Mike jammed the hammer back in his tool belt, accidentally jarring the thumbnail again.
“You know, we’re supposed to have something called the presumption of innocence in this country,” he said, grimacing and holding back a raging torrent of curses.
“I know.” The doctor nodded. “It’s terribly unfair.”
“So, what’re you gonna do about the fence?” Mike said, resisting the urge to suck the end of the thumb. “You gonna leave it half-done?”
He’d been in their kitchen and seen their magnificent granite countertops and Swedish energy-efficient dishwasher. These were not people who left things half-done.
“We might have somebody else come in and finish the job.”
Mike glared at him, and for a moment the pressure was so strong that he thought about taking the hammer and hitting the doctor so hard on the tip of the nose that blood shot from his eye sockets.
“I guess that’s your right,” he said.
“We weren’t going to ask for the money back. You’ve already done part of the work.”
“Yes, I have. And I’d hate to come back and pull it all out.”
“Heh, heh.” The doctor wheezed again, not sure if Mike was serious.
Mike had half a mind to do it right now. Just tear out all the fencing and leave gouges like teeth marks all over the property.
“Take your time cleaning everything up,” said the doctor, glancing down at the auger and the wheelbarrow that Mike had brought along today. “I’ll be here all morning.”
“Yeah, let me just finish the footings for the last four-by-four.”
Other contractors had told him not to use concrete to secure the posts because it could trap the water and make the wood rot faster, but did he really care at this point?
“By the way,” said the doctor, “what happened to your thumb?”
“JACK DAVIS?” BARRY,
on the phone, stood by the window, watching scattered fires still spitting and a yellow crane slowly removing pieces of wreckage from Ground Zero.
“That’s my name, don’t wear it out,” said a voice on the other end, so phlegmy and clubbable that Barry could almost hear the faux-wood paneling on the walls of the office from which it issued and see the law degree and Rotary Club awards in Lucite on the bookshelves.
“This is Barry Schulman. I’d been expecting to hear from you.”
“Have you now?” The bonhomie thinned just slightly. “Well, I’ve been busy as a fox in the henhouse. What can I do you for?”
“I’m supposed to be your client. As is my wife.”
“You don’t say.”
“I do. The Michael Fallon disciplinary hearing in Riverside?”
Jack Davis made a quiet
wup, wup,
sound like an old computer trying to read a warped floppy disc.
“Of course,” he said finally. “Your statement to the chief is right here on my desk. And I think I must have your wife’s statement too. Somewhere.”
“I can certainly fax you another copy if that’s necessary,” Barry replied evenly, having already decided to exercise more patience than he did with Mrs. Crawford at Town Hall. “But really I was hoping to have a chance to speak to you before the hearing.”
“Glad you caught me in, then. I can be harder to get a hold of than a greased pig. You understand, naturally, it’s not my full-time job, being the town’s prosecuting attorney. I’m doing this as a favor to the mayor, old Tom Flynn, who’s a dear friend of the family.”
“What kind of law do you usually practice, if you don’t mind my asking?”
“Oh, I putter around in insurance and real estate development a little. I’ve done some work for Olympia and York, Douglas Ellman, Northern Coastal, a few local outfits …”
The tinny bell went off in the back of Barry’s head. Northern Coastal, the golf course developers who gave the mayor’s son a job as a VP. As Buddhists and ward politicians alike understood: we are truly all part of one great whole.
“So have you ever prosecuted a case before?”
“Of course. I put in a few years at the Westchester DA’s office, back before the Civil War. Heh-heh-heh.”
Political appointee,
Barry thought. In the DA’s office, something like ninety-seven of the one hundred assistants were Republicans. The man might not know how to work a case, but he could certainly work a room. Not that there was anything wrong with a little patronage now and then. As a famous Southern governor once said, “What would you expect me to do, give contracts to
my enemies?
”
“Well, sir,” Barry said, trying to keep it friendly, “I know you’ve been preoccupied like everyone else, but I was trying to make sure you knew that both of us are available so you’d have a chance to talk to us and adequately prepare your case.”
“Damn kind of you, Mr. Schuler.”
“Yeah …” Momentarily disconcerted, Barry reached for the legal pad on his desk. “I also wanted to pass on some phone numbers to you for potential witnesses, in case you hadn’t had a chance to look them up.”
“Excuse me …”
There was some manner of kerfuffle on Jack Davis’s end of the line. A flap of papers, a side-of-the-mouth mutter at a secretary, a groan of a creaky drawer opening, and a door shutting noisily.
“You were saying?”
“I have the numbers of some potential witnesses who could do serious damage to Lieutenant Fallon’s credibility and help bolster my wife’s testimony.” Barry tapped his legal pad with a Cross pen.
“You do?”
“To begin with, I found a series of complaints from people who say the lieutenant beat them with a radio in his patrol car after they were handcuffed in Operation Ivory Snow a few years ago …”
“Old news.” Jack Davis cut him off. “Those charges were already dismissed by the Town Board. I’m sorry, Mr. Schiller, but I don’t see the relevance. Until that unfortunate incident with the Three Musketeers bar, that little campaign probably cut the crime rate in this town by three quarters and doubled the value of the house you’re living in.”
Unfortunate incident?
Nice way to talk about an unarmed black kid getting shot in the back. Nobody’s a liberal when he’s talking about the price of his house. Barry flipped the page, deciding not to push it.
“And then there are these two young ladies who’ve filed papers with the Civilian Complaint Review Board saying the lieutenant harassed them. I thought at least one of them might be a credible enough witness so that the hearing wouldn’t just be our word against his …”
“I’m sorry, Mr. Schulman”—Jack Davis’s chair gave a squeak loud enough to be heard through the phone line—“but how exactly did you come into possession of these phone numbers?”
“Freedom of Information Act. Standard stuff. No burning of incense or bowing down before graven images, I assure you.”
He decided to omit that unpleasant bit of arm-twisting he’d had to do with Mrs. Crawford at Town Hall. Davis would certainly hear about it soon enough.
“Are you an attorney?” said Jack Davis.
“A humble consort of the devil, just like yourself.”
“Then do you really think it’s appropriate for you to be both a witness
and
a witness wrangler in this particular rodeo?”
“I’m not sure how else these witnesses are supposed to appear if nobody calls them. Is this court a
magical
jurisdiction?”
Jack Davis paused as if he was seriously considering the question.
“I’m sorry,” said Barry, “but this is more than a matter of passing concern to me and my family. This man has posed an ongoing threat to us. My wife had a disturbing run-in with him at Home Depot the other day. And that night she got a rather threatening message over the Internet.”
Barry noticed a subtle change in the air quality of the room and realized that a door had opened behind him.
He turned and saw his secretary, Shameequa McPherson, from Do-or-Die Bed-Stuy, waiting by the Styrofoam NCAA backboard next to his bookcase. Cornrowed hair framed her delicate features like a beaded headdress, and thin yellow Walkman headphones rested on her clavicle like an Egyptian princess’s necklace. You could never be sure if she was listening to Master P or
Mastering Italian.
She raised a fingernail as curved and carefully adorned as a Grecian urn.
“
Attenzione,
” she said sotto voce. “Mr. Olson wants you.”
Barry lightly covered the mouthpiece. “Tell him I’ll just be a minute.”
“Mr. Olson wants you
pronto.
”
Something in her voice produced a tug in his side, and he was reminded once again that a good secretary could do as much with nuance and intonation as a great musician could.
“Mr. Davis, I’m going to have to call you back later today,” he said into the phone.
“Call me anytime you like, just don’t call me late to supper.”
“Thank you.” Barry put the phone down with a grimace and stepped away from it.
“The ways of white folks,” he said.
“You’re telling me.”
“What’s up?”
“The message was: ‘The coach wants to see you. Bring your playbook.’” She held the door open wide for him.
“That’s what they used to say in football when they were about to trade you.” He felt a tiny crick in his neck as he snatched his suit jacket off the back of his chair.
“And it’s what I told my last boyfriend when I broke up with him. ‘Don’t you try those moves on anybody else.’”
She looked him up and down as he buttoned the coat and brushed off his lapels.
“
Bello.
Not bad for an old guy,” she said. “If you were a couple of years younger, I might be giving you
un occhio sessuale.
”
“Or if I had a couple more dollars in the bank.”
He heard the joke land with a thud and realized something serious was afoot.
“What’s the matter?” He followed her out of the office.
The back of her dress drew taut over her hips. “I didn’t say anything.”
“Which is the same as saying
something.
I know you.”
“Maybe you don’t know as much as you think you do.”
He stopped in front of her desk, where the gondoliers of Venice drifted across her computer screen. “You trying to scare me?”
“
Honi soit qui mal y pense.
” She sashayed on ahead of him.
“That’s not Italian. That’s French.”
“I know. It means Evil be to him who thinks evil.”
Before he could ask her to explain, she doubled back to answer a ringing phone on her desk, leaving him to walk the rest of the way on his own.
The floor between here and Ross Olson’s office seemed to roll out before him like a long red velvet tongue. For the last two weeks, Retrogenesis stock had continued to plummet downward to five dollars a share—
five dollars!
—as other money managers began to follow Mark Young’s lead in shorting the stock. Every other day, a rumor tore through the office about a white-knight investor coming along to rescue them—on Tuesday it was the Japanese; on Thursday, it was Merck—but Ross just insisted everyone needed to take a Coridal and be patient while he searched for the best deal possible.
In the meantime, Barry had had lunch twice with Lisa Chang, ostensibly to prepare for her deposition in the Monkey Suit, but in reality to talk about future prospects. In her subdued, indirectly seductive way, Lisa had encouraged him to take heart and hold the course. There’d been a couple of unexpected breakthroughs in the lab on Long Island lately, having to do with manipulating the genetically altered squirrel monkeys by raising and lowering their body temperatures, and the potential long-term implications for the Alzheimer’s market were staggering.
If we can hang in there just a couple of more years, this could be bigger than the polio vaccine,
she’d told him over goat cheese salad and pad Thai noodles at the New Economy Café around the corner.
Unless we fuck it up and kill all the monkeys with pneumonia.