And suddenly, all the lights went out.
On the tree.
The rink below was still illuminated, a glowing rectangle in an otherwise suddenly black landscape. Well, there were lights on the street corners, and some lights on in the windows of 30 Rockefeller Plaza, across the street, but everything suddenly felt dark in comparison to what it had been not a moment before. There was a collective disappointed ohhhhh as the lights on the tree went out, but the skaters below went about their determined circling of the rink, and the few people on the street above began dispersing, some heading into the Plaza itself, where some of the store windows were still lighted, others walking down toward Forty-ninth, Patricia and Mark walking — well, strolling really, still hand in hand — toward Fiftieth.
The two men who attacked them seemed to materialize out of nowhere. They were both black, but they could just as easily have been white; this was the Christmas season in New York, and muggers at that time of year came in every stripe and persuasion. The mink coat was what they were after. That and Patricia’s handbag, which happened to be a Judith Leiber with a jeweled clasp that looked like money. One of them hit her on the back of the head while the other one grabbed her handbag. As she started to fall forward, the first one circled around her and yanked open the flaps of the coat, popping the buttons. He was starting to pull it down off her shoulders when Mark punched him.
The punch rolled right off him. The man was an experienced street fighter and Mark was merely a downtown lawyer who’d taken his girl uptown to see a Christmas tree. Jewish, no less. The irony. The man hit him twice in the face, very hard, and as Mark fell to the pavement, he turned toward Patricia again, determined to get that fucking coat. The other man kicked Mark in the head. Patricia screamed and took off one of her high-heeled shoes and went at the man who was kicking Mark, wielding the shoe like a hammer, striking at his face and his shoulders with the stiletto-like heel, but the man kept kicking Mark, kicking him over and over again, his head lurching with each sharp kick. There was blood all over the sidewalk now, he was bleeding from the head, she almost slipped in the blood as she went at the man again. “Stop it!” she yelled. “Stop it, stop it, stop it,” but he kept kicking Mark, kicking him, until finally the man trying to get her coat off yelled “Let it be!” and on signal they vanished into the night as suddenly as they’d appeared.
She was still wearing the mink.
One of the sleeves had been torn loose at the shoulder.
They’d got the Judith Leiber bag.
Mark Loeb was dead.
A month later, she joined the D.A.’s Office.
I figured she didn’t want this to happen to her again.
Didn’t want to lose another man she loved.
But, Patricia...
“Something?” she asked, and smiled, and reached across the table to take my hand.
“No, nothing,” I said.
The top of Andrew Holmes’s Chrysler LeBaron convertible was down, and the sky above was so blue I wanted to lick it right off the page. Every so often a fat white lazy cloud drifted overhead, shading the car as it floated past. It was a beautiful Sunday morning in the state of Florida, and like college boys on spring break, we drove first toward Okeechobee along Route 70, and then through Indiantown toward West Palm Beach, the jackets to our seersucker suits lying on the backseat, our ties loose, the top buttons of our shirts unbuttoned. We were wearing suits and ties only because we were making a business call. Lawyers wear suits and ties when they’re conducting business. When we found Jerry and Brenda Bannerman on their powerboat — a forty-five-footer rigged for deep-sea fishing — they were wearing, respectively, cutoff jeans and a thong bikini.
Jerry was a man in his mid-forties, tanned and fit, his cutoffs belted around his snug waist with a length of white line. His wife Brenda was in her late thirties, I guessed, a toothy, leggy brunette with blue eyes that matched her skimpy swimsuit. They were both swabbing the deck when we came marching up the dock of their club, a mile or so from their oceanfront West Palm condo.
Stowing the buckets and mops at once, they offered us a light lunch, and sat with us around a cockpit table under blue canvas, all of us chatting idly like good old friends, eating the delicious shrimp salad Brenda had prepared, sipping at iced tea in tall glasses afloat with lemon wedges. Jerry told us that he, too, was a lawyer. Brenda said that she’d been a legal secretary before they married, yet another revolting development. Too much expertise here, I was thinking. Andrew later told me he was thinking the same thing.
They told us they’d bought two apartments in their condo at a bargain price three years ago, and had broken through the walls to make one huge apartment overlooking the Atlantic. The Banner Year, as they called their boat, had been purchased after Jerry’s firm won a huge class-action suit and declared extravagant Christmas bonuses. They had been all over the state of Florida with it, had even jumped off to Bimini one fall — but that was another story.
“We hit a hurricane,” Brenda said.
“Wouldn’t want to experience that again,” Jerry said.
Brenda served little cookies with chocolate sprinkles on them.
She poured more iced tea.
It was time to get to work.
“As I told you on the phone,” I said, “all we want to know...”
“Sure, let’s cut to the chase,” Jerry said. “Did the S.A. offer you a deal?”
“He suggested we might want to make one after listening to his witnesses.”
“Might be a good idea,” Jerry said.
“Okay to turn this on?” Andrew asked.
“Sure,” Jerry said.
“I hate the way my voice sounds on tape,” Brenda said, and rolled her eyes. She had moved out into the sun. The three of us were still under the Bimini top, but she was now sitting aft of us, her face and the sloping tops of her breasts tilted up to the sun.
Andrew hit the REC and PLAY buttons. The tape began unreeling.
“What I figure he was trying to do,” Jerry said, “was...”
“Who do you mean?” I asked.
“Folger. Your state attorney. Aside from establishing that we heard shots, of course...”
This was not heartening news.
“...was establish a timetable. I could tell by the questions he asked me...”
“And me, too,” Brenda said.
“...that he had other witnesses who’d seen the accused on the boat before we came along.”
“How could you determine that?”
“Well, he asked if we’d seen a security guard in the booth near the gate, for example, so I figured...”
“Me, too,” Brenda said.
“...that the guard had some significance. So what could the significance be if the guard hadn’t seen the accused going aboard the boat where later we heard the shots?”
Shots again.
Witnesses to the shooting.
“He also asked...” Brenda said.
“Folger,” Jerry said.
“...whether we’d seen a sailboat coming in under power and tying up in slip number twelve, I think it was...”
“Twelve,” Jerry affirmed with a nod. “Which was another link in the time sequence, I figured.”
“Like whoever was on that sailboat must’ve seen the accused before we came along,” Brenda said.
“Folger was trying to establish that the accused was still on the Toland boat when we heard the shots,” Jerry said.
I bit the bullet, so to speak.
“What shots?” I asked.
“Well, gunshots,” he said.
“What time was this?”