A wacky, though comforting philosophy, Mack reflected while waiting for the elevator to arrive. Yes, a comforting philosophy until one pinned it down to just who “those people” were. It sure as hell wouldn’t be the Templetons, even allowing Hoover’s boy scout faith in the basic honesty and integrity of Janice Templeton. Nor would his salvation descend on him like a bolt of lightning from a smiling sky. The attorney found himself chuckling. Miracles yet! If such things were possible, who’d need lawyers? Sit back and relax, he’d said. Sure, in the poorhouse, because they’d all be out of jobs.
While at the time these thoughts were simply an exercise in frustration, they would remain in the lawyer’s memory the rest of his life, for just as one elevator arrived, so did a second one, discharging Reggie Brennigan. Later Mack would puzzle deeply over the coincidence of the two cars arriving at precisely the same time and of the detective stepping out of one just as he stepped into the other, each failing to see the other until Mack turned and caught a fleeting glimpse of frayed coat collar, stained and battered hat, and thick red neck through the closing slit of his elevator door. Later he would ponder over the split-second decision to thrust his arm through the narrowing breach.
“Ah! There you are, me, boy.” The old cop exuded a stale, winy breath into Mack’s face.
“Where the hell’ve you been?” the lawyer grumbled in distaste and nausea.
“Places,” wheezed Brennigan with a sly grin, and tapped his coat pocket significantly. Then, pointing toward the men’s room at the end of the corridor, he added, “Shall we step into the presidential suite?” His pale and watery eyes attempted a twinkle and failed.
A few minutes later Mack found himself inside a toilet booth behind a locked door, reluctantly sitting on the commode with his trousers lowered, all at Brennigan’s insistence, “for the sake of appearances, you know …” The detective occupied the adjoining booth, sitting similarly, and only after carefully judging that the coast was clear, did he slip his find to Brice Mack through the space at the bottom of the separating wall.
The several dozen photo blow-ups were of such poor quality that the lawyer could hardly make them out in the poorly lit stall. They were photographs of documents, to be sure, written in a quick, scratchy hand that, under the best of circumstances, would have been difficult to read. Riffling through the batch, Mack paused at one and felt his heart skip a beat. It was a photograph of a manila file folder with the name “Templeton” printed boldly across the tab.
During the next five minutes, the lawyer, having forced his perceptions beyond the limit of their powers, was able to wring enough data out of the documents to convince him that herein lay the bulwark of his case: the much-needed missing element.
His face was hot and flushed, and his voice cracked when finally he spoke to Brennigan.
“Is this stuff legitimate?”
The detective chortled hollowly back through the wall separating them.
“Is a pig’s pussy pork?”
“Jesus! Where’d you find it?”
“Where it’s been sitting these seven years—in the file room of the Park East Psychiatric Clinic on One Hundred Sixth Street and Fifth Avenue.”
“Jesus!” The excitement in Brice Mack’s voice was beyond restraint. “How the hell did you get in? I mean … how’d you get these photos?”
“Do you really want to know?”
“No,” the lawyer said quickly, and heard Brennigan laugh, and then heard a small slurping sound as the detective swallowed something from a bottle. “Did you talk to this Dr. Vassar?”
“No, she’s dead. I spoke with a doctor named Perez, a young talkative spic who used to assist her. Knows all about the case.”
“Jesus—” was all Mack could say.
At this point, someone came into the men’s room and noisily entered a stall at the far end. During the five minutes of enforced silence, Brice Mack’s emotions ran the gamut from delirious enthusiasm to numbing despondency. After the interloper had flushed, washed, combed, whistled a strain from “You’ll Never Walk Alone,” and left, the lawyer unloaded his despair onto the old cop.
“We’ll never be able to get this into the evidence. It’s a privileged communication.”
A soft, wheezing laugh which, at first, the lawyer mistook for a strained and flaccid fart preceded the appearance at the base of the wall of still another batch of documents, which, incredibly, turned out to be a Xeroxed copy of a 1040 form for the year 1967—the joint return of William P. and Janice Templeton.
Mack’s amazement was unbounded.
“Don’t tell me you also broke into the Treasury Department!”
“I’ll tell you all about it one day.” The detective chuckled, then instructed: “Turn to the clipped page.”
Mack’s fumbling fingers found the clip and turned to a page of medical deductions, a long and detailed list that only gradually revealed its secret. And there it was—on two separate lines—the lead to the Park East Psychiatric Clinic and, immediately below it, the item that blew their privilege.
It was too much for the attorney’s bruised and battered mind to handle all at once. Too goddamn much to think about while sitting on a crapper with his pants on the floor in the heart of the citadel of justice.
Brice Mack shook his aching head in a weary but happy way and tried to lean back against the wall but was prevented from doing so by a complication of pipes and knobs which dug into his back and which started him laughing. A laughter soon joined in by the old, lovely, besotted, beet-faced ex-cop in the adjoining stall. Mack could envision the dying eyes staring out of the pickled face, and the pathos of the image suddenly struck at his heart roots, and his laughter eased as memory took over. The memory of something his father had once said to him—long ago—after a bum had come to their door for a handout and, for good reason, was politely refused.
“My pity, I could not help him,” Max had said in Yiddish, weeping. “He is a man, a creature made in God’s image, with a mind and a spirit that might have been the salvation of the world. It is my pity that I could not help him.”
A humble smile came to Brice Mack’s lips as he thought about all the avenues that Reggie Brennigan—this creature in God’s image—had opened to him. And then he thought of what Elliot Hoover had said, and the smile became fixed. The machine purred smoothly forward under its own power—aligning forces, creating events, introducing people.…
Could it be?
Was it really possible?
21
The sight of the lean olive-skinned man, soberly dressed in dark suit and carrying a slim briefcase, stepping through the door into the courtroom at 8:55 a.m. on Tuesday, triggered a sudden déjà vu in Bill Templeton. Somewhere, recently, he had seen this man, had seen the face in close proximity thrust before his own in a fleeting encounter. He couldn’t be certain where, only that the face was familiar and that his instinctive reaction was one of panic.
Bill’s eyes fastened blatantly on the man’s face as he walked through the rail gate and took a seat at the end of their row.
It was at this weak and anxious moment that the identity of the man came to him in a sudden flash. They had met at the Park East Psychiatric Clinic. They had almost collided in the hallway that day he went to examine Dr. Vassar’s notebook.
Bill felt a cold sweat sprout on his face as Judge Langley, cross and tired, entered the courtroom and hurriedly convened the court. Bill’s memory of the man’s name was soon refreshed by Brice Mack, who stood and, in a voice both bright and eager, said, “I call as my next witness Dr. Gregory Alonzo Perez.”