"I see where you're going," O'Toole replied. "That somebody has something on Huttington and is blackmailing him to support Porter and get rid of me."
Santacristina nodded emphatically. "Yes. And what if this blackmail ties Huttington to what happened to my daughter?"
"I guess that's one possible theory," Marlene said slowly, then shook her head. "But on its face, I think most people would say these are two unrelated events, and we'd only be guessing at a connection."
"Perhaps," Santacristina agreed. "Perhaps I am just a father driven mad with grief. But I believe it is true."
"And you know what," Marlene said. "Something in my gut tells me it is, too." She looked at the other two men and thought of Butch. "The question is what can we do about it?"
Two hours later, Clyde Barnhill was about to call it a day when the telephone in his office rang. Sighing, he answered it.
"What in the hell is that Jew bastard doing getting involved in this?" said the voice on the other end.
"Hello, John," Barnhill replied. "I told you before. The 'Jew bastard' knew O'Toole's brother. They were roommates in college."
"Yeah, so the fucking district attorney for New York just happens to take a case in Bumfuck, Idaho," Porter complained. "You don't find that a little coincidental? I don't believe it for a minute. And now his wife is out here-hanging out with that Basque mother-fucker."
Barnhill did not like Big John Porter, nor his idiot son. But they served an important purpose for his friends back East, and so he resisted the urge to tell him to stick it up his ass.
"Calm down, John," Barnhill said. "We checked it out with friends in New York. Karp is on a leave of absence. He got shot but the shooter was not accurate enough. O'Toole obviously called him and asked for help. I wouldn't worry about his wife, obviously just some bored housewife who wants to play investigator."
"Yeah, and maybe you don't know, maybe she's working with Santacristina," Porter said. "She and O'Toole and that attorney fella, Meyers, were about to mix it up with my boy and his friends when Santacristina showed up. That a coincidence, too?"
"I've said it before, John," Barnhill replied, letting a little anger seep into his voice. "Your boy needs to lay low and stay away from those 'friends.' It draws attention to him right now and won't look good if it gets into this trial."
"Yeah, yeah, I've told my boy that he has to watch out for what he does in public. But he likes those fellas, and they, at least, treat him with respect," Porter replied. "Tough to keep an eye on him 24/7."
"I understand," Barnhill said. "We just need to be careful around the woman. She's the wife of the district attorney. If something happened to her, there'd be a lot of eyes looking this way."
The phone went so silent that Barnhill thought he could hear the poorly greased wheels in Porter's head grinding slowly. "Yeah, you're right," the big man agreed at last. "But nobody messes with my boy and gets away with it forever."
If your boy was any dumber, Barnhill thought, he'd be a donkey, and not a very smart one. "Well, my advice right now is that we all sit tight. There are more pressing concerns than Marlene Ciampi."
"I ain't so worried about her," Porter replied. "But like you said, she's the wife of the fucking Jew bastard district attorney of New York, and that ought to worry everybody. If you know what I mean."
"I know, John," Barnhill said. "And our friends are monitoring the situation. Now go have yourself a nice Jack Daniel's on ice, and I'm going home to do the same."
"All right, Clyde," Porter said. "And oh, hey, we going to get any huntin' in this winter? We can use the Unified Church property anytime we want and no fucking game wardens to worry about."
"Sounds like a plan, John," Barnhill said. "I wouldn't mind shooting something…I wouldn't mind that at all."
15
A stiff breeze swept down the concrete canyons, stirring up old leaves and litter as the few tourists willing to brave the elements on a chilly Sunday evening to window-shop along Fifth Avenue pulled their coats tighter and tugged their hats down around their ears. Despite the cold, V. T. Newbury hesitated outside of the towering skyscraper as the sun slipped into the cloud bank somewhere beyond New Jersey. He'd been going in and out of the skyscraper most of his life, but the only reason he had was now gone, and he felt as if he no longer belonged there.
A sudden gust of frigid air slapped him in the face, like someone trying to get him to come to his senses. He considered turning around and taking a taxi back to his place in the Village, but taking a deep breath, he pushed through the revolving doors. Normally, they would have been locked on a Sunday, but not when Dean Newbury's nephew was coming to visit.
As V.T. walked up to the security desk, the guard smiled and hooked a thumb toward the private Newbury, White amp; Newbury Only elevators behind him. "Good evening, Mr. Newbury, your uncle is expecting you," the young man said pleasantly. "And by the way, I was sorry to hear about your father. A nice man. Always had time to ask how I was doing."
"Thank you, uh"-Newbury glanced down at the man's name tag-"David. Yes, he was a good man. I miss him." Not trusting himself to talk about his father's death without crying, he entered the elevator and pressed the button for the top floor of the seventy-story building.
The family firm occupied the entire floor-and that was just for the senior partners and their secretaries. The entirety of the next two floors below also housed the firm's junior partners, as well as the foot-soldier attorneys, paralegals, investigators, secretaries, researchers, and, occupying a wing of its own, the all-important billing department.
When the doors opened again, V.T. stepped off the elevator and waved to the pretty receptionist at the front desk, who smiled and pointed toward the office of his uncle, Dean Q. Newbury, the impervious, flint-eyed, most senior of senior partners.
"They got you working on a Sunday?" he asked the receptionist as he headed in the indicated direction.
"If your uncle's here, I'm here, Mr. Newbury," she called after him.
V.T. hurried down the hall, but then slowed as he approached the office opposite his uncle's, which had been his father's for nearly fifty years. The door was open and the lights on, so he stepped inside.
It was a magnificent office, as befitted the number two partner of the nearly two-hundred-year-old firm. The entire office was four times the size of his quarters at the District Attorney's Office. The furnishings were much nicer, too-soft couches and chairs done in light tan leather, with accents of wood around the library and the trim.
The main room was dominated by an ancient rosewood desk, said to have once been owned by George Washington when the ragtag Continental army was holed up on "York Island," awaiting the armed might of the British Empire. There was also a full kitchen with oak countertops and a refrigerator on which photographs of V.T. and his mother hung from magnets. The walls were tastefully decorated with art, including a large oil painting of V.T.'s parents and himself as a five-year-old boy, enjoying a picnic on the beach at the family's Cape Cod oceanfront house.
More photographs of the family were propped along the bookshelves, which were full of various texts. They weren't just law books, either, but the sort of books a bright young son might choose to read during a visit to his father's office while the old man worked. Dickens's Tale of Two Cities. A first-edition copy of Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises with the inscription "to my fishing buddy, Vincent, Warmest Regards, Ernest." History books. Poetry books. Copies of the Bible, the Koran, and the Torah, plus treatises on Buddhism and Hinduism.
There was even a much-thumbed copy of Jack Kerouac's On the Road. Its hard use indicated that his father would have preferred a transient life spent in smoky coffeehouses, listening to Beat poets, to his penthouse suite and corporate law. But that was simply not an option for Newburys, for whom duty to the family firm was cast in stone-at least not until V.T. and his cousin Quilliam broke the mold.