He told them about Veronica in a quiet voice, dripping with abashment. Yes, he’d had a mistress. Her name was Veronica Ashland. She had been a college student hooked on crack. He had pulled her out of a crack house he had been closing down in West Philadelphia and had personally brought her to a drug rehabilitation center. After saving her life he felt some responsibility to her and visited her in the treatment center. She was getting healthier, learning to live without drugs, and between them a friendship blossomed that turned into something more. He was sorry for the pain it had caused his wife, his family, it had happened and he was sorry and now it was over. “But I am truly bitter,” he said, “toward my deceitful aide who has sought to use my painful relationship with this poor girl against me.”
He saved his bitterest vitriol, of course, for Chet Concannon. A lying, ungrateful cur, he called him. Chet was a nothing when Jimmy found him, a steak slinger who dreamed of getting involved in politics. He had given Chet a job as an intern and promoted him through the ranks until he had become his chief aide. He had trusted Chet Concannon, he had loved Chet Concannon, and in the end, Chet Concannon had betrayed him. Chet was a thief, a liar, he had peddled Moore’s good name for a quarter of a million dollars. For all Jimmy knew Chet was a murderer, an arsonist, he didn’t know exactly what Chet had done to keep his scam going, but he had learned the painful lesson that Chet Concannon was capable of almost any heinousness to achieve his self-interested ends. “Just the other day, in this very courthouse,” said Jimmy, “Concannon attacked me physically. He is seeking my ruin. He is my Brutus, plotting my fall. He is my Judas.”
When his direct examination was finished, there was an emotional silence in the courtroom. Prescott stood at the podium, eyes down, letting the silence hang there and intensify. I looked at the jury and they were split. Half were looking at Jimmy with sympathy and affection and admiration. The other half were staring at Chet Concannon with a violent contempt. When the silence hung just long enough for maximum effect, Prescott smiled at Jimmy as one smiles to a friend and said, “We have no further questions.”
“Mr. Carl,” said the judge, “do you wish to cross?” He peered down at me over his half-glasses and waited for my response.
I had not yet recovered from the sight of Chuckie Lamb dying in my arms, I had not yet been able to erase the amazement of it, the sense of awe, the overwhelming rush of fear. This man who had been alive just a few moments ago was now dead, his life had flowed out the gash in his throat, past my shoes, into the sodden ground beneath the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier of the American Revolution. The sight of it was something I would haul along with me the rest of my days. I came home from the park after driving around for hours to find Beth asleep on the couch. What I did was strip off my clothes and dump them in the washer, raincoat and sneakers included, and I washed them with three cups of detergent while I stayed under the shower until the water turned cold. And then I slept, or tried to, shaking myself awake whenever I dreamed of Chuckie with the beard that wasn’t a beard. I hadn’t yet had the time I needed to deal with my first encounter with a dead man.
But this I knew. Chuckie Lamb wasn’t killed by some young hustler out to rob his trick, like the papers made it seem, and Chuckie Lamb wasn’t killed by a drug dealer out to scare off the councilman, like Jimmy Moore made it seem. No sir. He was killed because he was going to tell me all he knew about the councilman and the missing money. He was killed by Jimmy Moore, who had killed Bissonette before him and who would kill others if need be, Jimmy Moore, who had lied to Chester, to me, who had lied under oath on the stand, Jimmy Moore, with his cheap sanctimony and elephantine prick, Jimmy Moore. He had done it, dammit, and I would make him pay, I would, I would hurt him, I would. If I achieved nothing else in this life what I would achieve was to hurt Jimmy Moore.
He sat there on the stand, his chest thrown out, his eyes hard with determination, he sat there waiting for me. Well, he would get me, all right.
“Mr. Carl,” said Judge Gimbel. “Do you or do you not want to cross-examine this witness?”
“Oh, I want to, Your Honor,” I said, rising and walking with great purpose to the podium. I stared at Jimmy Moore and he stared back and for a moment we were locked together in some violent rush of antagonism. And then I saw it, what I had been looking for, what I had been hoping to see: fear. He knew what he was facing, did Jimmy Moore. The bastard knew what I knew, knew what I felt, and he was right to be afraid.
I tapped the podium softly with my fist once, twice. And then I began.
50
AFTER IT WAS OVER, after all the shouting, after all the sustained objections, after all the lies and the questions repeated with emphasis and the repeated lies, after all the pounding on the podium and the admonitions of the court and the requests for citations of contempt by Prescott and Eggert both, after all the sidebar conferences, after all the portentous questions asked and withdrawn before an answer could be given, after all the shouting, I was back in my apartment, hugging my chest as I lay curled on my couch, my shoes still on, my head in Beth’s lap as she caressed my scalp and promised me it wasn’t, it wasn’t, it wasn’t as bad as all that.
“Oh, yes it was,” I said, and yes it had been.
I had charged at Jimmy Moore’s story like a bull, my horns aimed straight at its heart, but when I picked up my head I realized I had charged past him and he was still sitting in that witness chair, calm, smooth, waiting to deflect my next pass with his cape of lies. He was the matador, controlling me with his pace, with his responses, and he made a fool of me more than once in the course of the interrogation.
“You did all you could do,” said Beth.
“He ate me for lunch, and spit out the bones.”
“Now you’re feeling sorry for yourself,” she said.
“The bastard was lying, Beth. All I wanted to do was to show him up to be a liar.”
“That’s not so easy a thing to do with a practiced liar. You didn’t get everything you wanted out of him, but you got all that you needed.”
“You think?” I asked.
“Yes.”
“Well, maybe,” I said, and maybe I had because I never for a moment thought I could win the case on Jimmy Moore’s testimony alone. My idea was that the truth would save Chester Concannon, a quaint idea in this age where obfuscation and spin are the key to success in all realms, but there it was, and I could never have expected anything approaching the truth to come from Jimmy Moore’s lips. No, the most I could have expected from Jimmy Moore was to create a pedestal on which the truth could later stand and that was maybe what I had done.
I had asked him about his daughter and he told again how she had died. I had asked about the rush of emotions that overcame him upon her death and, practiced as he was in exposing his inner feelings when they could do him the most good, he spoke of the pain, the agony, the anger. And out of it all, I had asked, had grown a hatred for those who sold drugs to children, hadn’t it, Councilman?
“They are murderers, killers of children.”
“And you hate them all, with all the power of your powerful passion.”
“That’s right, Mr. Carl.”
“You have rededicated your life to fighting the scourge.”