That would be a terrific position for me, I knew. It was on charitable boards and political committees that lawyers found clients. Serve on enough boards, get enough clients, and you become a rainmaker, with the power to go to any firm in the city and name a price. I didn’t jump right away onto my hind legs and say, “Okay,” but I was thinking.
“So who killed him?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” he spit out. “God, I wish I did. You’re the man with the theories, you find out. See if you can do any better than we did.”
I looked out over the vacant lot and then the neighborhood. There was something eerily familiar about it. “What number is this?” I asked.
“Nineteenth Street.”
Now I knew where I was. The old baseball stadium had been a block away. Connie Mack Stadium. Where the park had been was now a big modern brick church, like a giant McDonald’s, but when it had still been a ballyard my grandfather had brought me there to watch the Phillies play. He called it Shibe Park, its old name. We’d sit in the bleachers and chant, “Go Phillies Go,” and watch Willie Mays beat the hell out of the home team. Richie Allen and Clay Dalrymple, Jim Bunning and Johnny Callison. And Gene Mauch sitting in the dugout, his dark face in the pained squint that became permanent after the team collapsed in ’64. But what I remembered right then was not just the baseball but the young boy holding his grandfather’s hand, walking past the parked cars on 20th Street to get into the park. How had he become me?
“Where’s the rest of the money?” I asked, suddenly tired of the dog-and-pony show, tired of Jimmy Moore’s self-righteousness. “The missing quarter-million.”
“I don’t know,” he said, his arm spreading over his vacant lot. “But it’s going to end up here, I’ll make damn sure of it, and in the others we will build. I’m working on it as we speak.”
“Mr. Raffaello wants his share.”
“Not a penny,” he shouted. “They sell their poison right under his nose and it’s fine so long as he gets his cut. He’s a disgrace. I’d sooner die.”
“I’m sure he could arrange it.”
“Let him try. If he wants a war that’s what he’ll get.” He pointed a thick finger at me. “I’m ready to take him on and take on anyone else who gets in my way. We’re going to fill this vacant lot and fourteen like it with facilities that will heal a generation. It is my mission, and I will do anything to protect it. Anything. My mission is all I have left to care about now.”
I guess it all was getting to me, the false nobility, the lies, the inevitable bribes, a deal here, a settlement there, a position on an influential board. Was it so clear that I could be bought, was a “FOR SALE” sign printed on my face, unmistakable above my watery eyes. I hated it, especially here, where I felt haunted by the little shoe merchant and the young boy holding his hand. I couldn’t help my anger from bubbling out. Even so, I might have kept quiet if his prick hadn’t been so damned thick. But when he got all self-righteous on me I thought of the sight of him in that cold shower and I got even angrier and I said, “But that’s not the only thing to still care about, is it, councilman?”
“What else could there be?” he asked, his voice as plaintive as if there could be nothing.
“Fucking Veronica,” I said.
I regretted it immediately, regretted it all the more when he turned his startled face to me. It was twisted strangely into a mask that proclaimed both helplessness and need and, for the first time since I met him, Jimmy Moore was speechless.
But from what Veronica had told me and from the mask on Jimmy Moore’s face I could piece it all together. Still in a rage from his daughter’s death, he bursts into a crack house and sees her on the floor, helpless and high, about the same age as his daughter would have been, this pretty young girl on drugs, as pretty as his daughter. She might even have looked like her. And he shelters her in his car and takes her to a treatment center and saves her life, like he had been unable to save his daughter’s life. And he visits her, his surrogate, and he makes sure she is cured, and bit by bit some deep desire starts rising from the forbidden, locked portions of his soul and he finds that he can’t help himself, the unthinkable has become real, the impossible had become inevitable, and it is finer than any imagining.
36
YOU CAN LEARN EVERYTHING about a man by learning what he truly wants. I had seen the bricks and glass of Jimmy Moore’s greatest ambitions; they dwarfed my own in grandeur and worth. I felt a strange, sad sympathy for Moore, with his grand dreams of healing and his own hopeless love for Veronica Ashland, both built on a foundation of tragedy, and truly I hoped his grand dreams could all come true. But not over the rotting carcass of my client.
“We need to talk,” I said into the pay phone, taking no chances on a tap.
“My office, at five,” said Slocum.
“Forget it,” I said. “Last time I went there it made the front page of the Daily News.”
“You got some heat, huh?”
“Like Las Vegas in August.”
“Never been.”
“Hot,” I said. “Let’s find a bar.”
“Dublin Inn?”
“Too many ADAs. How about Chaucer’s?”
“Fine,” he said. “Make it later then. Eight o’clock. Something interesting?”
“You’ll think so,” I said, and I knew he would.
See, Prescott made a mistake, really. Had he treated me with the respect I craved, had he taken me to lunch as his guest at the Union League, at the Philadelphia Club, had he welcomed me with open arms into the fraternity of success, I might have sat quietly, willingly, and let Concannon eat whatever shit Prescott served him. But the bastard had threatened me, given me orders, turned me into his cabana boy, and that was his mistake. In the rush of my late-night prowlings with Jimmy Moore and his entourage, of my society functions, of my mentorship with Prescott, of my sexual obsession with Veronica, of my work and play with the Bishop brothers, of this new life that had seemingly been granted me, in the midst of it all I had lost my resentment for a while. But it was back, with a vengeance. It slipped over my shoulders like a favorite old sweater and it felt damn good. Even if the orders from my client prohibited me from actively engaging in the trial, even if my cut of the Saltz settlement and my deals with the Bishops and my directorship of CUP required my formal obeisance in court to Prescott, even if all that, my resentment still demanded I do something, anything, something, no matter the consequence. Concerning the mystery of who killed Bissonette, Jimmy Moore had said, “You’re the man with the theories, you find out.” So maybe I would.
What I had discovered from Raffaello was that Bissonette might have been killed because he was playing around with the wrong woman, so now all I had to do was find Bissonette’s final fatal love. Lauren Amber Guthrie and her jangling gold bracelets? Maybe. Some other woman with a husband bent for revenge? Possibly. Or was it Chuckie Lamb after all, silencing the one witness who could connect him to everything? And what about the missing quarter of a million dollars, two-fifths of which was owed to Enrico Raffaello and the rest of the downtown boys? I wanted answers and quickly, before Eggert started nailing the shingles on the roof of the jail Prescott was building around Chester Concannon and before Raffaello started pressing me for information. Which is why I had called the man with the grand jury subpoenas, my old friend K. Lawrence Slocum, ADA.