My first reaction was to sit down at that counsel table and put my head in my hands and try to keep from crying. It is undignified for a lawyer to cry at a trial, unless it is in front of a jury and then only for effect. But the jury was out of the room, the spectators were milling, my client had left for the men’s room, in that situation crying was not a trenchant strategy. Even so, I couldn’t stop my eyes from watering. I heard Prescott laugh to my left, not a loud laugh, but loud enough.
I felt a hand on my arm and I turned around as quickly as my hangover would allow.
It was Herm Finklebaum. He was back on his heels, smiling thinly at me. “You feeling all right, buddy boy?” he asked.
“Not so good just now,” I said.
“I been watching you, like I said I would, but I ain’t seen much.”
“By design,” I said.
“By whose design? Eggert’s?”
“It’s a very complex strategy, Herm. You wouldn’t understand.”
“A toy company came out once with a doll that pooped in its diapers,” said Herm Finklebaum, the toy king of 44th Street. “I asked the sales rep, ‘What’s the fun in that? I’ve changed diapers. Changing diapers is not fun.’ The rep told me I didn’t understand but that the doll was hot hot hot, that it was going to sell like flapjacks. I bought fifty for the Christmas season, sold three. He was right, I didn’t understand, didn’t understand that I was being a schmuck for buying fifty.”
“What’s your point, Herm?”
“Point? There’s no point,” he said, turning away from me and starting to walk away in his jaunty, splayfooted walk. “It’s just a story I like to tell on myself.”
As I watched Herm walk to the rear of the courtroom I saw Beth sitting in the back row, staring at me, not triumphantly or angrily, just staring. She stood and gestured me to meet her in the hallway. I nodded and turned around again.
I didn’t have much time to figure out what I was going to do. Judge Gimbel would be asking me if I had any questions for Ruffing at the end of the twenty-minute break and then and there I would have to know for sure. But I really needed to figure it out for myself before then, before I faced my client, before I faced Beth.
After the shock of Prescott’s questions had worn off, I realized I shouldn’t have been surprised at all. Of course Jimmy would betray Chester, he was a politician, after all, and the only difference between a politician and a viper is that a viper’s fangs retract. And how could I ever have assumed that Prescott’s offer of opportunity meant anything other than opportunity at a price? But the price was so damned high. To shuck all the principles of my profession with the ease of shucking an ear of corn and let my client suffer an unrebutted attack that would leave him imprisoned for the rest of his life was almost unthinkable. But then again there was money to be made, bonds to be forged, opportunity to be seized. Valley Hunt Estates was just the first of a myriad of projects that would be offered me as I rose to the upper echelons of my profession. Prescott would make it all happen for me, he had as much as promised it. They say behind every great fortune is a great crime and I had always been waiting to find mine to commit. Now here it was, and all I would have to commit was nothing. And even if I tried to do something, what could I do, stand on the table and holler that the mobster Raffaello had killed Bissonette? That would get me nothing more than a contempt citation. And what about the threats from Norvel Goodwin and Chuckie Lamb? And what about the exploding hatchback window and the message of the lead? And what about…
But even as I debated it all in my mind, I knew what the answer would be, never truly doubted it for a minute. And right in the middle of deliberations I shut off my thoughts like I shut off a faucet, stood, and left the courtroom.
Chuckie Lamb was waiting for me in the hallway. He grabbed my arm and pulled me aside and his fish-lipped grin was unpleasantly dark. “You going to ask Ruffing any questions, Vic?” asked Chuckie.
“I don’t have time for this,” I said. “I need to talk to my client.”
“You going to ask any questions, Vic, or are you going to be their good little boy?”
I leaned into him and stuck a finger in his chest, like my Uncle Sammy would have. “Look, Chuckie. As far as I’m concerned you don’t exist, your threats, your opinion of me, it’s like you’re on Mars. I’m going to do what I have to do.”
I turned around and walked away from him, on my way to meet Chester and Beth, but his voice chased me down the hallway. “We all do what we have to do, Vic.”
The room we found had pale green walls and a formica table with steel legs. Metal chairs were jumbled there and here. Beth gestured toward a chair and Concannon sat. She stood over him. I sat at the table across from him. Even though there were only the three of us, with a trail of ashes fallen out of the tinfoil ashtray and sprinkled over the table, with the too many chairs, with the stale air in the room, it felt crowded.
“There’s nothing to worry about,” Chet said. I looked at him carefully, wondering whether he truly didn’t know there was a six-inch blade buried knuckle-guard-deep in his back.
“Are you really this stupid, Chester?” said Beth. “Or is this all an act?”
Chet didn’t get angry or start to shout. He clasped his hands together on the table and stared at them for a moment. “The councilman told me about this line of questioning last night,” he said finally. “If Prescott couldn’t get into evidence that Raffaello’s daughter was sleeping with Bissonette, then the councilman told me Prescott was going to do whatever he could to make it seem like the whole thing might not have happened the way Ruffing said it happened.”
“Well, did your friend Jimmy also tell you,” said Beth, “that if Prescott convinces the jury that you were taking money on the side and were the one making the threats, he could walk out of here smelling like a violet while you got the jail time?”
“He told me he was taking care of me,” said Chet.
“Sure he is, Chester,” she said. “He’s going to take care of you all the way to a twenty-year racketeering sentence.”
Chet stared at her without saying anything. I turned around to look out a window, but there were none in the room. For a moment I felt I was in a coffin.
Beth said, “With your prior convictions, Chester, Victor and I had no intention of putting you on the stand, so we didn’t want you to tell us what happened. But now we need you to. How much would Ruffing give you in that envelope?”
He shrugged, but he answered her. “A hundred thousand each time, like he said, a check for fifty and fifty in cash.”
I turned away from the wall and stared at him. “And you let Prescott lie to me about the money?” I asked.
“You said you were asking the same question the jury would ask,” said Chet. “Prescott told you exactly what we were going to argue to the jury, that’s all.”
“Why not the truth?” I asked.
“Because the truth looks bad,” said Chet. He shrugged, like a boy caught at a prank, and I turned away from him again.
“Who told you to get it in cash?” asked Beth, continuing her interrogation.
“Jimmy.”
“And what did you do with it once you got it?” she asked.
“I gave it to him.”
“All of it?”
“Yes, all of it. He sometimes gave some back to me. He liked me to have cash for his expenses. And sometimes he gave me cash for Ronnie.”
“You never took any out for yourself?”
“Never.”
“Come on, Chester,” she said. “Never even a little?”
“I didn’t keep my job for five years by stealing from the councilman.”
“Were you there the night of the murder?”
“No.”
“Who did it?” she asked.
“Raffaello.”
“Who told you it was Raffaello?”
“The councilman.”
“And you believe him?”
“Absolutely.”
“Chester, listen to me,” she said slowly. “Jimmy Moore is selling you out.”