The Last Good Day (47 page)

“I was wrong not to tell you everything about Johnny the first time,” she said. “I thought I could get away with it because I’m not the same person I was then. But you have to know that I’ve never been unfaithful to you. Not even for one day. I’m not saying I’ve never thought about other men, any more than you can honestly say you’ve never thought of other women …”

For a split second, he pictured Lisa Chang smiling and brushing her long black hair out of her eyes and then quickly banished the image from his mind.

“But I am saying that when it’s counted, I’ve always been there for you. And you damn well know it.”

He eased forward in silence for a few seconds, watching an old man with a cane pat Fallon on the back before the cop went to join his wife in the front of their Caprice. He saw them lock their doors and put on their seat belts without looking at each other. And in that instant, he decided he did not want to live the rest of his life that way.

“Okay,” he said with a sigh.

“Okay what?”

“Okay. I’m going to believe you.”

“Gee, thanks …”

She checked her eyes in the mirror and then decided that perhaps sarcasm wasn’t quite the appropriate response here. She took a second to let the relief set in.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I should say I’m glad. And I should say I’m going to believe in you too.”

“Yes, you should.”

“Though how we’re going to get through the next few months, I don’t know.”

“I’m more worried about the next few days.” Barry took one quick look back at Fallon’s car and then made a right turn out of the lot.

50

WHAT BOTHERED GWEN FLORIO
most as she sat in the Riverview Diner with the client and his wife was not so much the quick craven stares from the old ladies in the booth across the aisle, the brusque pen-on-pad skitter as their waitress took their order without looking at Fallon, or even the grim tight-stitched expression Marie wore as she kept looking at her watch and dipping her tea bag nervously into her cup. It was the Thomas’s English muffin with a light smear of butter that sat untouched on Mike’s plate.

He’d skipped lunch to help her prepare for cross-examination this afternoon, and now she was urging him to eat something to keep his strength up.

“Marie, I know it’s hard for you to take time off from work, but your presence is so important in the courtroom at this point.” Gwen smiled at the wife in a show of womanly sympathy. “All you need to do is sit in the back for a few more minutes at the next hearing. Just to let the mayor and the rest of the board members know that you’re still there for Mike.”

Fallon bowed his head, still staring pensively at his plate. Probably meant nothing, Gwen tried to reassure herself.

“Because what you’re doing is sending a strong message to the board,” Gwen went on, not daring to break eye contact with Marie lest she get up and walk away. “You’re saying, ‘This is a family. This is my man. I believe in him. We’re standing together in the storm. You will not break us apart.’”

Marie kept giving little nods, as if she were a dashboard figurine going over a bumpy road. She was shaky, but she was going to be all right. She was a good girl, Gwen realized. A truehearted girl. The type who’d always said her prayers, scrubbed the toilets at midnight, organized the closets on weekends, and never contradicted her man in public—even when he was making a total fool of himself. Someone, in short, she could never be friends with in her own private life. But she wasn’t going to be the problem. She’d sit in the back of the courtroom and smile bravely and do whatever was necessary to keep up appearances.

Mike, on the other hand, was starting to scare her a little. He was getting the “dog face.” That sunken resentful expression that seemed to suggest he expected a good whipping. He was writing too many feverish notes to her in court as well, which did nothing to convey the appearance of confidence to the board members. His thumb looked hideous, almost incriminating all by itself. She kept telling him to get it looked at by a doctor, that it wasn’t healing properly. And finally, there was the matter of the uneaten muffin. Even as she kept up her spiel to Marie, Gwen found her eyes being drawn to it, thinking of how it was growing colder by the minute.

“I’m glad you were able to be there for this afternoon’s testimony, because we scored some real points on Mrs. Schulman …”

Her eyes nipped over again quickly, trying to see if there was anything obviously wrong with the muffin. A fly circling. Green mold. Rancid butter. Probably meant nothing. But Florio’s Grand Self-Indicting Cheeseburger Theory kept bothering her. Something her husband, Shep, used to say back in the old Yonkers days. Get a suspect in a room with a bag of White Castle cheeseburgers. If he starts eating, he’s guilty. If he leaves them alone, he probably didn’t do it—because what innocent man could stand to eat after he’d been falsely accused? As she did with most things her husband said when he was alive, she’d dismissed it out of hand.

Of course, now that he’d been dead five years, she’d started to admit there might be something to it. In the handful of cases she’d had in which the defendant was truly not guilty of all charges, she’d seen officers go on a kind of de facto hunger strike, picking disconsolately at their club sandwiches and potato salad like a bunch of bony-hipped schoolgirls. It was the part of the job she truly hated, watching substantial-looking men waste away like that. The guilty ones were always easier to represent. She never lost any sleep worrying that one of them was going upstate. You gave it your best shot, picked up the check, went home, and never thought about them again.

“So when do you think you’d need me?” Marie fumbled for the appointment book in her cloth handbag. “I have the kids out of school at three and meetings most of the day tomorrow. Are you still thinking this hearing is going to go for a full three days?”

“Hard to tell at this point. I’m supposed to have twenty-four hours’ notice before any new witness is called who wasn’t on the original list. Court is going to be closed tomorrow, and the chief and Mr. Schulman are on the schedule for the next day. But Jack Davis left the door open a little this afternoon, saying there might be some last-minute additions.”

Mike touched his silverware tentatively, not daring to look at either woman.

He was a fool, Gwen told herself. Probably guilty of all charges,
in this case.
It was only her sly brilliance and legal brinkmanship that would get him an acquittal.
All hail Gwen Florio, queen of all strategists, defender of the boys in blue! The guiltier they are, the better I am for getting them off!

But something had alarmed her in court this afternoon. A look that crossed Fallon’s face when Sandi Lanier’s name was mentioned. It wasn’t the phonied-up outrage or even the fraudulent solemnity she would’ve expected. It was a sudden flinch in the eyes. No one else would’ve been close enough to see it. And even if they did, they might have taken it as the flinch of a guilty man confronted with the truth. But in that tiny spasm of muscle above the eyes, Gwen saw something else far more upsetting: a man facing a lie. And expecting
her
to do something about it.

“So do you think other people might come forward?” Marie put her appointment book away and leaned over her steaming cup of tea.

“That’s always a possibility in a public hearing like this.” Gwen lowered her voice. “Especially with that jingle of money from a civil suit in the background. Anybody can say just about anything, up to a point.”

She cleared her throat, trying to get Mike’s attention. But he was busy gazing off into the mid-distance, watching a long gray sliver of the Hudson churn past the restaurant windows.

“We’re still going to win this, though, aren’t we?” Marie asked. “We still have to live in this town. My children talk to their friends at school.”

“I know how hard this must be for you, Marie.” Gwen covered her hand for a second. “That’s why it’s so essential to show the board that you haven’t taken a step back from Mike.”

“You didn’t answer my question, though.”

Marie took back her hand and scooped the tea bag out of her cup.

“Are we going to
win?
” she said.

As Gwen watched Marie wrap twine around the sodden brown bag on her spoon, squeezing drops into her cup, she realized that she might have misjudged this woman. There was solid titanium under those pixie bangs and apple cheeks.

“I think there’s a good chance we’ll prevail,” Gwen said, weighing her words carefully.

“I see.”

Gwen watched her daintily wring out the last of the droplets and then set the flattened tea bag down on the side of her saucer. And in that instant, she understood that this was a woman who would know when to cut and run.

“Marie, I wonder if you could give Mike and me a few minutes to talk on our own,” Gwen said. “There are a few minor points I need to go over with him.”

“Of course, I understand.” Marie signaled to a passing waitress. “Maybe I can get this tea in a cup to go. I have a few phone calls to make anyway. I can sit in the car outside.”

“Thanks, hon,” Mike said.

The first words they’d spoken directly to each other since they sat down. As Marie leaned over to give him a quick perfunctory kiss on the cheek, Gwen saw Mike’s hand go up as if he was about to grab her wrist and hold on to it. But she was on her feet and out of reach before he could touch her.

For a moment, Gwen felt a small warm tickle of compassion for him. But then her eyes fell back to the uneaten muffin on his plate, reminding her of the terrible burden of trying to save what might be a falsely accused client, and her pity cooled into a cold hard lump in the pit of her stomach.
Don’t worry about him. Just do your job and let the court decide.
But now he’d infected her with his misery. Goddamn the innocent.

“Okay,” Marie said. “He’s all yours. See what
you
can do with him.”

51

“BELIEVE ME, I UNDERSTAND
your reluctance,” said Barry, sitting at a wobbly kitchen table with a neatly folded napkin under one of the legs.

“You do, do you?” Muriel Navarro set down a cup of microwaved Sanka before him and lowered her eyes.

The three other nannies who shared this cramped little third-floor apartment above the recently closed Genovese drugstore on River Road were gathered in the other room, eating chips and watching a videotape of a television show called
Survivor.
With grave misgivings and icy courtesy, Muriel had invited him upstairs after he approached her on the street a few minutes ago, just so she wouldn’t have to be seen talking to him out in the open.

“My wife was reluctant about testifying as well,” he said.

She put a pink botanica bag down on the kitchen counter. “You don’t want any milk with that?”

“No, thank you.”

“You know I’m not doing this, right?”

“I completely understand your reasons.”

“I only let you come up for a minute because I’m polite. It doesn’t mean anything. Once you finish your coffee, I’d like you to leave.”

“Of course.” He carefully turned the cup on its saucer. “Maybe I would like a little milk to go with this.”

She opened the buzzing old refrigerator, took out a quart, poured it into a delicate white pitcher with flowers around the border, and lightened his coffee for him. He sensed that there was a small chance here.

“She really took a beating in court today, my wife.”

Muriel put the milk back in the refrigerator and closed the door.

“They brought up all kinds of things that she’s never even told me about. Abortions, old boyfriends. They ripped her to shreds.”

She turned her back to him and started taking newspaper-wrapped packages out of the bag. One by one, she carefully unfolded them, revealing a series of brightly colored candles poured into tall glasses.

“Whaddaya got there?” he said, studying the lettering on their sides. “Votives or prayer lites?”

She gave him a bemused look. “You know about botanica?”

“I used to work in the Bronx. We had one right around the corner on Gerard Avenue. I lit a nice fat
Causa de Corte
and an orange Chango for good luck every time I tried a case.”

He didn’t mention that it was the idea of a secretary in the office or that his supervisor, Sean Heffernan, always bitterly complained about the smell they left.

“So, what’d you buy?” he asked.

Muriel pursed her lips, looking faintly embarrassed. She seemed like the kind of young woman who’d spent her teen years smoking blunts and hoisting forties on the corner and had only begun to admit that there might be something to that old-time secret religion Grandma practiced in a back room on Southern Boulevard.

“Is that a Saint Michael?” he asked, pointing to a red candle.

“Saint Anthony,” she corrected him.

She moved a long red-painted fingernail to the other candles in the row. “Infant of Prague,” she said, reluctantly enumerating the names one at a time. “
Virgen Milagrosa, Sagrado Corazón de Jesus,
Seven Angels. This here is for Elegua, keeper of the crossroads”—she paused on a pink candle—“because my cousin’s traveling. And this one …” She stopped on a green candle that said “Lotto” and had dollar signs on the glass. “This one is for me.”

“What’s that blue one on the end?”

“Saint Lazarus.” She let her finger trail along the rim of the blue candle’s glass. “Chiara, the little girl I look after, has been sick a couple of days. I’m praying for her. You’re not supposed to fall in love with them, but you do. Bet you think that’s dumb, right?”

“I won every single case when I lit a candle.” He shrugged. “And even I wasn’t
that
good.”

She smiled in spite of herself and turned around to get some kitchen matches out of a drawer.

“Look”—he sipped the coffee slowly, finding it bitter on the back of his tongue—“I know testifying against the lieutenant is taking a risk …”

“You’re damn straight. I don’t have a husband who’s a lawyer or a house in the West Hills. If I wind up in the river, ain’t nobody gonna care except them kids I look after.”