“He was murdered.”
“Have they found his body?”
“No.”
“Then how are you so sure?”
“One of the killers told me.”
“Jesus, God. Who?”
“He’s dead also, Mr. Justice, his throat slashed and his body dumped beside a shipping container on one of the piers along the riverfront.”
The justice’s face tightened and grew more lopsided. “When was this?”
“A few weeks ago.”
“Why?”
“The police don’t yet know. It could be anything. But twenty years ago he had been hired to beat up Tommy Greeley. He got carried away. That’s why Tommy disappeared. The man with the slit throat was a client of mine; I’m now representing his mother in a wrongful death action. To that end, I’m trying to learn who hired him to beat up your friend Tommy Greeley in the first place.”
The justice stood from his desk, placed his arms behind his back, and strolled around me toward the shelves above the divan. He reached for the fencing trophy, held it with one hand as he tested the tip of the statuette’s foil with his thumb.
“Do you remember a nominee to the court named Douglas Ginsburg,” he said. “A stellar judge, nominated by Reagan. Reports came out that, while a professor at Harvard, he was at parties where marihuana was smoked. Can you imagine parties at Harvard where marihuana wasn’t smoked in those days? Still, it was enough to scuttle his nomination.”
“And that’s the danger for you represented by Tommy Greeley?”
“He was my friend. He was a drug dealer. It won’t take much for the Neanderthals on the left, sitting back stoned on their couches, to make their insinuations.”
Even as he said it I thought of an organization the justice missed in his litany of opponents, TPAC, the Telushkin Political Action Committee, membership one. I could see him now, Jeffrey Telushkin, sitting on his chair, clapping his hands with glee as I sat here asking Jackson Straczynski about his former friend, now dead, who might be used to sully his reputation and sink his chance for the big seat. The image turned my stomach.
“I really am not here to hurt you or your chances, Mr. Justice. I just want to learn what you can tell me about Tommy.”
“I entered college in the seventies,” he said, without the venom his voice had carried before. “Drugs were everywhere, at every party, in every dormitory hallway. It was impossible to avoid, and many had no desire to avoid it. Tommy Greeley was one of those. We both went out for the fencing team. I liked him from the first. He was smart, rebellious, entrepreneurial, an innovative young man and a brilliant fencer. We both started with the sport at Penn, were well behind the rest who had fenced in prep school, but Tommy was a natural. Other than fencing, I was interested in art, literature, culture. I was something of an aesthete. Dorian Gray. An embarrassment now, but the way it was. Tommy, other than fencing, was like the rest of my generation, interested only in getting high and getting laid. I told you we had divergent interests. That was where we diverged.”
“You didn’t use drugs at all?” said Kimberly.
“What’s next, Miss Blue, boxers or briefs? Let’s just say it is an improper question and leave it at that. I won’t answer it here, or in the Senate if I get the opportunity. But I will tell you this. I had a younger brother named Benjamin who lost his way. Speed turned him crazy, truly, and his craziness got him killed. I saw first hand with my brother a drug’s insidious power to destroy.”
“When did Tommy start selling?” I said.
“Early on. At first it was only marihuana, just enough to keep himself supplied. Then he fell into a crowd that was selling more and, with his entrepreneurial bent, he quickly took it over. He teamed up with a man, short and thick with a scarred face – Prod I think his name was, Cooper Prod – and together they began selling far beyond the confines of the university. This was now his junior year or so. I met my wife at about the same time, fell deeply in love, moved off campus to live with her. Eventually, even before I graduated, we married. But Tommy had found something perfectly suited to his talents. And even as he ran his enterprise, he still received excellent grades, enough to get him into law school. Later, during law school, I heard he had moved up to cocaine. Less product, more profit. There were even a few law students who had gone in with him. But by then I had pretty much cut him out of my life, for understandable reasons. Occasionally we would have dinner, the four of us, talk about law school, our futures. But he never mentioned his business and I never let him. He knew what was happening to my brother, knew how I felt about it. That was it, the extent of our relationship.”
“You said the four of us.”
“My wife and I. Tommy and his girlfriend, Sylvia. Sylvia Steinberg.”
“Was Tommy seeing anyone other than this Sylvia?”
“Why?”
“The police report on the missing persons complaint filed by Mrs. Greeley seemed to indicate that he and Ms. Steinberg had broken up.”
“All I knew for certain was Sylvia. But it was a difficult time. There was an FBI investigation, there were indictments. It was a huge scandal at the law school. The people he was working with, they all went to jail. When he disappeared we figured he had run away from everything.”
“Do you have any idea why anyone might have wanted Tommy hurt or killed?”
He put the fencing trophy back on the shelf but didn’t turn around to face us. And as he spoke the following words, his sharp voice grew sharper and his tall elegant frame seemed to contract upon itself, to deform itself, to hunch itself into a taut knot.
“The truth is, he was dealing with dangerous people, Mr. Carl. Maybe he didn’t know how dangerous. He was greedy, he always wanted more. He had made hundreds of thousands of dollars selling his poison, he had a beautiful girlfriend, he had the whole world at his feet, but it wasn’t enough. Tommy Greeley was hungry, ravenous, he wanted everything he could lay his grasping little hands upon and finally he took too much and paid the price.”
“Too much of what?” I said.
But before he could answer the door burst open and a green-eyed woman stepped into the office, stuck out her hip, flung her arms up to the sky like a showgirl jumping out of a cake. She was tall and slim, energetic, she was dressed like a gypsy with hoop earrings and a bandanna over her hair. Red gloves came down to her elbows, her frilly skirt came down to her ankles. In one raised hand was a bottle of champagne, in the other were two champagne flutes.
“Darling,” she said. “I have wondrous news. We simply must celebrate.”
I recognized her. She was the woman with the shy smile whose picture was in the slate frame, older now by a couple decades, but still her smile was bright, her face was all glittering angles, her eyes so glowed with vivacity and spirit it was as if she vibrated with some fierce energy. The proprietary way she stood in the doorway, the way she perfectly matched the exotic decor, stated without a doubt that she was the justice’s wife. But as he turned to her, still in that strange hunched posture, as he turned to gaze, startled, at his wife, his face held not the arrogance it had showed to us, or the bored, overfamiliar visage of the long married. No, as if one of the masks on his shelf had been pulled from his features to show the reality behind, his face was seething with emotion. There was passion, there was fascination and fear and disgust. And most of all there was love, pure and painful, innocent and imprisoning, a love that was strangely sad, perversely lonely, and absolutely abject.
His expression recovered quickly, the mask was replaced, the swirl of emotions that had flooded his features for a brief second disappeared as suddenly as it had come. And it was only later that I began to wonder if maybe, just maybe, in the powerful stream of emotions that hunched the justice’s posture and distorted his features, there lay not just a glimpse into the painful depths of a troubled marriage but also the seeds of a motive that might have cost Tommy Greeley and, yes, Joey Parma their lives.