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.
Chaucer’s was a friendly sort of neighborhood saloon with a famous shuffle bowling game, cheap paneling, stained-glass windows in the doors, and deep booths where groups of kids right out of college could sit and drink pitchers and gossip about other kids right out of college. When I first started going there it was filled with older, blue-collar types, with truck drivers, with lesbians who dressed like truck drivers, with college dropouts who ruefully discussed their dubious futures. But it no longer had that type of charm. Now the boys wore their baseball caps backwards, ponytails spilling out beneath the brims, the girls sheathed their long legs in black leotards, and they were all college graduates, discussing their dubious futures with pride. I still drank there, but now I felt too old to be a part and that was scary and sad both. I still remembered when it was a thrill just to be inside a bar, when the soft lighting and cigarette smoke and strangers on the stools whispered something so seductive I couldn’t believe I could just walk in, sit down, and order a beer. But now I was one of the older and the sadder and the people slipping in were younger, gayer, more vibrant than I. Now I knew what the older people in the bars used to think of me because I knew what I thought of this new generation. I wished they all would just go home to their mamas.
Slocum and I were sitting in one of those deep booths toward the rear of the bar. The waitress had given us each a bottle of Rolling Rock and a glass and each of us had ignored the glass. I almost liked Slocum. He took it all very seriously, as one would want a public prosecutor to take it all very seriously, but he had a sense of humor, too. It was a weary sense of humor, that was the only type a prosecutor would ever allow himself, but even a weary sense of humor put him leagues ahead of the rest. I told him the whole story of my meeting with Raffaello, although I left out the part where he called his daughter a slut. I still remembered that Jasper and Dominic believed nothing was as important as keeping one’s word, and though I almost liked Slocum, I wasn’t willing to bet my life on whether or not he had a connection to Raffaello. Everyone else seemed to in this burg.
“He said it was a jealous husband?” asked Slocum.
“He didn’t give me specifics.”
“So right now it’s just a mystery girl.”
“Right,” I said.
“And you want me to check it out?”
“Yes.”
“To send out my detectives to find that girl?”
“That would be terrific.”
“You want me to send out my detectives to find this mystery girl, the existence of whom was disclosed by the biggest criminal in the city, all in an effort to destroy my murder case against your client.”
“Exactly.”
“I don’t think so.”
“Larry, an innocent man is getting railroaded here.”
“Or maybe Raffaello’s lying. You ever consider that gangsters sometimes lie? Nothing happens in this town without him getting a cut. Maybe he was part of the whole thing and now he’s throwing out false leads to take the heat off his compares.”
“I don’t believe that,” I said. “Not for a minute. What I believe is that you’ve got the wrong guys facing death row and you don’t want to admit it.”
He shrugged, like he wasn’t certain that I was wrong. “Maybe, Carl. It happens. But you’re going to have to do your own investigating. How much you getting an hour for this case? No, don’t tell me, it’ll just make me ill. Earn your money, find the girl yourself.” He rubbed his hand over his mouth and looked at me for a moment. “But maybe I can help.”
I just stared at him and waited.
He leaned forward and lowered his voice. “All right, I’m going to tell you something. I’m telling you this because I think there’s a chance, small, but a chance you may be right. But if it comes back in my face in some motion or in a newspaper article I’m going to be very disappointed, do you understand? And you don’t want to disappoint me.”
He paused and took a drink from his beer.
“When we showed you the physical evidence,” he continued, “we didn’t show you everything. There was a book.”
“Shakespeare?” I asked.
“More like Ma Bell.”
“A phone book?”
“A personal phone book.”
“You withheld Bissonette’s little black book?”
“Now don’t get like that,” he said, raising a hand in protest. “The office made a determination that it wasn’t appropriate to release Bissonette’s personal phone book, as it might tend to embarrass certain, how should I phrase this, certain well-known and highly placed women in the city. These women and their families have privacy rights. This wasn’t like a hooker’s book with the names of her johns. There were no crimes committed here.”