“Objection, Your Honor!” Hilliard thundered. “Move to strike that question! It’s irrelevant, prejudicial, and utterly without foundation! Who is Officer Lenihan? What does any of this have to do with Detective Della Porta’s murder?”
“Sustained,” Judge Guthrie said. He replaced his glasses, then addressed the jury, his mouth quavering faintly. “Strike the question from the record, and ladies and gentlemen, please strike the question from your mind. Ms. Rosato has no right to ask such a question without proof or evidence. Please remember that a question by an attorney is not testimony from a witness stand, and you may not consider it as such.”
The jurors looked grave, and a black man in the back row nodded in understanding. But Bennie could see their eyes trained on Reston, whose expression was dull with restrained fury. She had engaged the enemy. She didn’t know how far the conspiracy went or who was at the center of it, but she understood that she had provoked it, poked it like a tiger in a pen. But no cage could contain this beast, and sooner or later, it would strike back, defending its own survival.
If Bennie didn’t kill it first.
“I have no further questions,” she said. She turned her back on the witness, walked back to her chair, and sat down.
63
Surf caught up with Joe Citrone outside the Eleventh, just as he was pulling away. The asphalt of the parking lot behind the station house was a slick black and almost empty. Everybody on tour was out now or at lunch. Citrone had his new partner in the car, so Surf had to play it cool. He couldn’t rip Joe’s throat out, which is what he really wanted to do. “Joe, we need to talk,” he said casually.
“Can’t.” Citrone looked out the window of the patrol car, his hands resting on the steering wheel. The engine rumbled, jiggling beads of rainwater that warmed on the cruiser’s hood. “We just got a job.”
From the passenger seat, Citrone’s partner Ed Vega ducked his head, smiling under his mustache. “How’s it hangin’, pal?” Vega said.
“Good, good, Ed,” Surf said, drumming his fingertips on the wet roof of the car. “Gotta delay you for a minute, my friend. Your partner owes me some cash, and I’m seeing my girl tonight.”
“Gotcha, big guy,” Vega said, and Citrone frowned.
“Need it now?” Citrone squinted against the last of the rain that dripped through the window. The storm was dissolving to a fine, chill mist.
“Yeah, I need it now,” Surf insisted with a fake laugh, and opened the door. “Cough it up.”
“Relax, kid.” Citrone unfolded his long legs from the driver’s seat and got out of the car. Gravel crunched underneath his shoes, their patent polished to a high shine, and he slammed the car door closed. “Be right back, Ed.”
“This way.” Surf took Citrone’s arm and led him a distance from the car, out of Vega’s earshot. Vega could be undercover, for all Surf knew. That was how they got those cops in the Thirty-seventh, with a sting. Took down the whole district. Surf didn’t trust anybody anymore, least of all other cops.
“Get your hand offa my sleeve,” Citrone said when they were alone. He tugged his arm from Surf’s grasp. “I’ve had it up to here with you.”
“You’ve had it?” Lenihan’s temper flared. “You fucked this up so bad, none of us are going to get out of it.”
“You got a fresh mouth, Lenihan.”
Surf glanced at the patrol car and flashed a Boy Scout smile. “I told you this would happen. I told all of you, but you thought it was a big goddamn joke. We’re made, Citrone. Rosato was askin’ questions in court this morning. She’s on to us.”
“Tell me somethin’ I don’t know. You think you’re the only one with people in the courtroom?”
“I don’t need people. I was there myself.” Surf didn’t mention the bitch catching up with him outside the courthouse. He didn’t want Citrone to give him shit. “I heard it all.”
“Then you heard Rosato say you’d be testifying against Art.”
“What?” Surf looked at Citrone, shocked. “Me, flip on Art?”
“That’s not true, is it, kid? She’s bluffin’, isn’t she?”
“Of course she is.” Surf’s mouth felt dry. “I mean, of course it ain’t true. You kiddin’?”
“You shoulda stayed away.” Citrone shook his head as he reached into his back pocket, retrieved a slim calf billfold, and plucked out a new twenty from the neatly ordered bills. “Take this in case my partner’s watchin’. Then get lost.”
“Sure, I’ll get lost.” Surf snatched the bill from Citrone’s hand and pocketed it. “I’ll get lost when I get my cut of the half a mil.”
“It’s comin’.”
“Yeah, when is it comin’? I coulda taken my cut off the top. I coulda taken the whole fuckin’ pile, but I didn’t. I brought it to you like a good boy and you said to wait. Fuck, what am I waitin’ for?”
“The right time.”
“What’s that mean? Why can’t we divvy it up now? Then we can all get the fuck outta Dodge.”
“No.”
“Why not, Joe? Fuckin’ explain it to me, old man. You might have to say a whole sentence.”
Citrone’s eyes went flinty. “Every time there’s a meet, there could be a witness. Every time there’s a phone call, there could be a tap. Be patient ’til the situation is under control.”
“Like it was in control last week and the week before that? Della Porta was takin’ money from us, and you didn’t know about it. He was settin’ up that cunt.”
“All along, I knew.”
“So what, you knew? You knew” Surf’s temper gave way and he raised his voice. “You didn’t do dick about it, Citrone. That’s your MO. You know everything, but you don’t do anything.”
“Calm down,” Citrone said quietly, which only made Surf angrier.
“Fuck you. You act like you got muscle, but you got nothin’ goin’ on. Nothin’!”
Without another word, Citrone turned around and walked away, leaving Surf standing there in the rainy mist, alone with his fear and his rage.
64
Back at her office, Bennie’s associates yammered away while her tired eyes meandered over a print on the wall of the conference room: Max Schmitt in a Single Scull, Thomas Eakins’s portrait of the rowing lawyer who was the painter’s idol. She found herself looking at Eakins himself, unidentified in his own painting and sculling with effort in the background. Eakins had lived in Bennie’s Fairmount neighborhood, only a block from her, and his mother had had manic depression most of his life, too. Funny.
Bennie’s gaze wandered to the window. She wondered how Eakins felt when his mother died. Why didn’t he paint that? Or her? The night offered no answers, only darkness, and clouds obliterated the stars. Bennie had rowed on nights like this night, when the river flowed as black as the sky, carved into onyx ripples by the wind across its surface. On those nights she felt herself at the very center of a black sphere, suspended above and below a darkness without density.
“Bennie, do we have a blood expert yet?” DiNunzio asked, reading from notes on a yellow legal pad. Carrier sat to her left, swiveling side-to-side with nervous energy. To the right of the associates sat Lou, listening carefully, his chin grizzled gray and wrinkling into his hand.
Bennie came out of her reverie. “I’ll cross their blood expert. It’s a matter of logic, not expertise. I can get him to say what I need.”
“Then that’s it,” Mary said. “There’s only twenty-five things left to do, without the blood expert.”
“By tomorrow morning?” Judy asked. Her Dutch-boy haircut had gone greasy from a day of raking it with her fingers, and her face, usually so game and honest, looked wan.
“No, not tonight,” Bennie said. She stood up and gathered her papers. “All of you are going home, including you, Mr. Jacobs. I’m going to look over my notes for tomorrow one more time, then get out of here. None of us can do good work if we’re dead on our feet.”