It was my turn now, my chance to speak to the jury on behalf of my client. In front of me was a yellow legal pad with the lengthy and impassioned opening argument Beth had drafted and I had rehearsed the night before. But as I rose, I left it on the table. In my hand was a single white sheet. On it was written the following little speech:
MY NAME IS VICTOR CARL. I AM REPRESENTING CHESTER CONCANNON IN THIS CASE. MR. CONCANNON IS JIMMY MOORE’S CHIEF AIDE. HE HAS BEEN INDICTED AS PART OF THE GOVERNMENT’S VENDETTA AGAINST JIMMY MOORE. YOU WON’T HEAR CHESTER CONCANNON ON ANY TAPES. THERE IS NO CORRESPONDENCE LINKING HIM TO ANY OF THE CRIMES ALLEGED HERE. I EXPECT YOU WON’T HEAR MUCH ABOUT HIM AT ALL. TRY TO REMEMBER, WHENEVER YOU HEAR HIS NAME, HOW LITTLE HE IS INVOLVED, AND AT THE END OF THE CASE I AM SURE YOU WILL ACQUIT HIM OF ALL CHARGES.
I glanced at Prescott, who was jotting down notes upon his legal pad, purposefully avoiding my gaze. I glanced at Concannon, who was staring at his hands clasped together on the table. I twisted to look at the audience. The courtroom was packed. Beth was frowning at me. Chuckie Lamb was pinching his lips together as he shook his head. In the aisle I saw Herm Finklebaum, the toy king of 44th Street, smiling at me with encouragement. I walked to a spot just in front of the jury box, surveyed the jurors one by one, and then read the anemic piece-of-shit opening that had been written for me by Brett with two t’s.
When I sat down I was actually embarrassed.
The first witness was Special Agent Stemkowski, the WWF reject sitting with Eggert at the prosecution table. For a bruiser Stemkowski was very well spoken, calm, and deliberate, able to keep a straight face as he used phrases like “I exited the vehicle” and “I effected implementation of the interception of Mr. Ruffing’s phone conversations.” He wore a camel-colored jacket, a white shirt, a calm blue tie. On his thick pinky he wore one of those flashy gold class rings, undoubtedly commemorating his graduation with honors from the FBI Academy. He had played football in high school, tight end, he said, and when Eggert drew out this insignificant piece of testimony, three of the men in the jury box nodded with approval. His demeanor on the stand was evidence that the country was in good hands, the soft competent hands of a receiver with biceps like great ragged chunks of pig iron.
Stemkowski explained how the FBI had been investigating a drug operation being run out of Bissonette’s by a bartender, an operation not in any way involving Bissonette or Ruffing, when it had begun wiretapping the club’s phones. It was through those wiretaps that the Bureau had discovered the extortion scheme. Special Agent Stemkowski authenticated the cassette tapes, identifying the marked date and time on each cassette as being in his handwriting and accurately based on FBI logs maintained during the surveillance. Eggert then produced thick loose-leaf binders containing all the transcripts, which were first authenticated and then distributed to judge and jury.
An FBI audio man had set up a sophisticated tape playback device with microwave transmission to headphones placed at the counsel tables, on the judge’s bench, beside each seat in the jury box. I would have liked to hear Bruce Springsteen pour out of those headphones, the Grateful Dead, the Rolling Stones, I would have liked to hear Jimi Hendrix’s version of the national anthem strip away the wax from our ears, but that’s not what we heard through those government approved high-fidelity headphones. What we heard, playing clearly, numbingly, for the whole of two full days, were the taped conversations of Michael Ruffing and City Councilman Jimmy Moore.
Moore: Don’t do this, Mikey. You back out now, your project’s dead. Dead.
Ruffing: My new investor don’t think so.
Moore: It’s that cookie baker, isn’t it?
Ruffing: Shut up. You were taking too much anyway, you know? You were being greedy.
Moore: So that’s it, is it, Mikey? I’m sending my man Concannon down.
Ruffing: I don’t want Concannon.
Moore: You listen, you shit. You talk to Concannon, right? I ain’t no hack from Hackensack, we had a deal. A deal. This isn’t just politics. We’re on a mission here, Mikey, and I won’t let you back down from your responsibilities. You catch what I’m telling you here? You catch it, Mikey?
I had heard the tapes before, knew every line now almost by heart. I knew what had been said, but the jury didn’t. When Moore threatened the hell out of Michael Ruffing on the tape the whole of the jury, headphones firmly on, reacted like I had reacted the first time I had heard it: their necks reared, their eyes fixed on both Moore and Concannon, and the squints in their eyes were like squints of a posse intent on a hanging. Not an encouraging sign after just one witness.
27
“TELL ME HOW YOU got involved with Jimmy Moore,” I ordered Veronica. “Tell me how.”
She was stretched beneath me, her wrists tied stiffly to the headboard with long silk scarves, her legs pinned down by my bent knees. She snapped at my belly with her teeth, at my chest. I stretched my body over hers, pressing down hard, and we clawed each other with our mouths. It wasn’t kissing in any way I had known kissing to be before, there was a violence to it, a rapaciousness. We stirred each other’s hunger and satisfied it at the same time. When she bucked her hips and raised her knees, opening herself for me, I sat up again and grabbed her hair and laughed at her.
“Tell me.”
“After,” she breathed.
“Not after. Now.”
“Let me loose and I’ll tell you.”
“Tell me and I might let you loose.”
She jerked her hands trying to get free but the scarves, long and soft and creamy maroon, were strong and the knots I had tied with boy scout accuracy and enthusiasm held. In the light of the candles we had set around the loft bed her flat stomach flickered yellow as her hips rose violently. She tried to kick me off but I rode her like a bucking mule and stayed right where I was. I stretched my weight on top of her and we clawed each other with our mouths and again she tried to open herself to me and I wouldn’t let her. It was my turn on top and I had control for once and I was going to keep it.
These scarves and pseudo-violent acts, this outbreak of forced control and mock desperation, this was not my usual thing. I had liked my sex slow and soft, an easy glide, a dance of the lips and the hips, rising and falling in a series of synchronous crescendos, Fred and Ginger swaying together in black and white as he tapped out a subtle mysterious rhythm and the feathers of her boa floated about them in sensual waves. If the sex of my earlier life had been a movie, it would be Dancing in the Dark. But it had turned with Veronica. We weren’t in the middle of a light romantic comedy. Sex with her was more like Marathon Man and she was the dentist. But we had tried it my way and we had tried it her way and believe me when I tell you this – her way was better.
I knew I shouldn’t be there in her apartment, but the danger of it all drew me as much as the sheer addictive kineticism of our sex. That I had been warned, that a car window had shattered in front of my face, that if Jimmy found out about us everything might be lost, all that and more drew me there. Even as I banged the steering wheel of my car with my palms at my foolishness, I still drove to that Olde City building, coming at her beckon, where I would rise up in that Plexiglas windowed elevator and knock on her door, knock quietly, head bowed, as reverent as a supplicant before the Pope.