Now, when I think back on that smile of mine, full as it was with hope and anticipation and deference to my patron, I think of the chuckle it must have given to that bastard and I can’t help but wince.
32
I WAS IN MY OFFICE ALONE, late, checking through my mail and making calls, when Morris phoned with the bad news. I had spent another awful day in court, the only kind I seemed to allow myself, another day where I sat silently beside my client and let the evidence spill over him like ocean waves unchecked by any reef. And afterwards I had come back to the office to find it deserted again. I had not seen Beth since the afternoon of Ruffing’s cross-examination. She was conveniently absent when I was around but I noticed that the personal effects in her office, the photograph of her father, the photograph of her sisters, the little outhouse whose doors opened up with the touch of a button that she got such a kick out of, one by one the personal effects were disappearing. She was leaving, no doubt, she had meant what she had said, Beth always meant what she said. And so we would no longer be GUTHRIE, DERRINGER AND CARL or DERRINGER AND CARL but just plain AND CARL, and each night thereafter would be like that night, where I was left alone with nothing but the emptiness of the office and a pathetic stack of mail. On the high road to success.
My mail that day was much like my mail every day, letters confirming conversations on the telephone that in no way matched the descriptions in the letters, advertisements for legal journals and continuing legal education courses, an accounting firm’s brochure listing all the exciting ways it could make my practice more successful, when in fact the success it was seeking was its own. And then, in an ominous manila envelope, on crisp paper backed with a blue piece of cardboard, I found an answer. No, it wasn’t an answer to life’s more perplexing questions, like why we exist or how to drink beer and laugh at the same time without getting suds up your nose. What it was, actually, was an answer to the motion for a protective order I had filed on Veronica’s behalf against one Spiros Giamoticos, Veronica’s landlord, who had been leaving dead animals in front of her doorway in an effort to chase her out of her bargain lease.
Giamoticos was being represented by Tony Baloney, which was a surprise since Anthony Bolignari, Esq., dubbed Tony Baloney by the admiring press, was one of the more successful and expensive drug lawyers in the city, an interesting choice of counsel for a deranged landlord. You wouldn’t see Tony at the Philadelphia Bar Association dances or lunching at the Union League, even though he outearned most of the big-time corporate types. There is a certain pungency to drug lawyers, to mob lawyers, to those attorneys who represent society’s outlaws, a smell that makes such lawyers unwelcome in the more hallowed hallways of the bar. Where you saw Tony Baloney was on the evening news, his cheeks jiggling beneath his wide walrus mustache as he explained in overwrought language the details of still another acquittal for one of his clients.
The answer Tony had filed stated very simply that Spiros Giamoticos had not done any of the things Veronica had claimed he had done, which was not a surprise because Tony’s clients always pleaded not guilty, even when the cocaine was found inside their intestinal tracts, wrapped in greased prophylactics swallowed before boarding the plane from Bogotá.
“Yes, Victor,” said Tony Baloney into the phone, after I had waited on hold for a solid five minutes. “Not surprised you are calling. This nasty Giamoticos matter, I assume.” His voice was high, exuberant, punctuated by the deep breaths of the asthmatic. “My daughter resides in that very building. Giamoticos brings your motion to her. Like a devoted father I agree to take the case. I expect you’ll do your best to make me regret it.”
“Is he going to stop the animal killing crap?”
“It’s not him, Victor. He says he didn’t do it.”
“You sound like you’ve said that before.”
He laughed. “Yes, well,” he said. “Maybe I have. That’s the speech for the lummoxes in the DA’s office all right. But sometimes it happens to be true.”
“He killed her cat,” I said. “I know. I was forced to clean it up. The tenant I represent has a bargain-basement lease and he wants her out so he killed her cat.”
“‘Courage, man. What though care killed a cat, thou hast mettle enough in thee to kill care.’”
“You speaking Spanish?”
“Not a devotee of the Bard, hey, Victor? Too bad. There’s more to learn of law from Shakespeare than from all the digests put together. So tell me what it is your client wants.”
“What she wants, Tony, is to be left alone.”
“Well then, darling, how about a deal?” he asked. “You withdraw this scabrous motion. My guy will swear to be a perfect gentleman. Follow the letter of the law. Stay forty paces from your client.”
“Like he’s on probation?”
“Just like.”
“No skulking around hallways, no more dead birds from him?”
“I’ll vouch for him. He didn’t do it. He wants no trouble. The whole legal thing scares the ouzo out of him. It seems the law is different in Greece. I keep telling him there are no firing squads in America.” I could hear him pound his desk as he shouted, “There are no firing squads in America!”
“Deal,” I said.
“Good, Victor. Good. Now this Veronica Ashland. She’s Jimmy Moore’s friend, isn’t she?”
“I have nothing else to say.”
“Discretion is good, Victor. I like that. I need to be discreet too. But even so, Jimmy and I used to be buddies. A drink or two together now and then. But after what happened to Nadine he wrote me off. The wrong side, or some nonsense like that. She was a good kid too, Nadine. Her biggest problem was her father. Jimmy thinks he’s a new man, that what’s past is prologue. ‘But love is blind, and lovers cannot see.’ Merchant of Venice, Victor.”
“I don’t understand,” I said, and I didn’t. All I could catch was that he was trying to threaten Jimmy through me and I didn’t like it. I had received enough threats in this case to last me a lifetime.
“I can’t say anything more at the moment. Discretion, right? Just tell him what I said. And if he wants to call me, he can.”
“Sure,” I said, but I didn’t feel very messenger-boyish just then, especially not for fat Tony Baloney. I figured I would let him threaten the councilman on his own.
So it was back to the mail, reviewing letters, dictating missives of my own into the little tape machine for Ellie to butcher on the typewriter the next day, marking it all down on my time sheets in six-minute increments to be billed. That’s what I was doing when Morris called.
“Vey is mir, Victor. It pains me to have to call you this evening, I hope you appreciate that. During the short time we have worked together, Victor, and I mean this with all sincerity, you have become like mishpocheh to me. I wouldn’t say like a son because, frankly, we haven’t become that close, but a nephew, maybe, a distant nephew, a nephew from a foreign country, a Czechoslovakian nephew, yes? And so, being that you have become as dear to me as a Czechoslovakian nephew, it pains me to tell you what I have to tell you.”
“What is it you have to tell me, Morris?”
“First I want you to know that we left, mine son and I, not a single stone but that we turned it and not a single path but that we followed it to nowhere.”
“Just tell me, Morris.”
“Your Mr. Stocker, your thief, I know he is somewhere on the Gulf of Mexico, I know it, I can taste it, he is so trayf you wouldn’t believe, but still I can taste him on his boat, floating happily, bobbing up and down, as happy as a Cossack on a sea of vodka, that happy, Victor. He is there, I know it, but where I can’t tell you. If I could tell you where he was then I’d be a happy man, but such is life that we are not to know such happiness until we find ha’olum haba’ah. Do you know what such is that, Victor? Ha’olum haba’ah?”