The door to his office was open, and Cohn stood in the middle of the room in his stocking feet. He was a short, wiry man to begin with and, shoeless, seemed even smaller, but the lack of size only served to enhance his intensity. The eyes were the same, fanatical and charming and vaguely wicked, but Abatangelo sensed something different, too. Immaculately groomed, meticulously dressed, he looked well-tuned but joyless. A winter tan helped obscure the weariness in his face. He held a fistful of paper, puzzling at another pile of paper on the floor.
Abatangelo announced himself with a knock on the door frame, saying as Cohn glanced up, “Back from the dead.” He came forward, shook the lawyer’s hand and smiled, feeling the architecture of thin bones, the ropy muscles, thinking- tennis. True sign of the arriviste; he’s taken up tennis.
Cohn stared dumbfounded. In time he managed to say, “Mirabile visu.”
Cohn was known to throw the Latin around. Jewish lads of his generation, he’d tell you, primed for a career in medicine or law, had little use for French or Spanish. This particular phrase meant: A wonder to be seen.
Abatangelo glanced around the room. “Same could be said for your digs.”
Buddhist phalluses and other fertility charms littered the shelves of a tea cabinet. A temple dragon, chiseled from sandalwood and large as an Airedale, glared from the corner. Above it hung a wool and burlap thing that looked like a french-fried bedspread.
“Apologize to Joanna for me,” Abatangelo said. “I think I frightened her.”
“You’re bigger than you used to be,” Cohn acknowledged, looking him up and down. He gestured as though to convey bulk. “And to be honest, you look a little harder than I remember.”
“Same old me,” Abatangelo assured him.
Cohn smiled. “If that’s so, prison ain’t what it’s cracked up to be.”
They shared a spate of uneasy laughter.
“You busy?” Abatangelo asked, gesturing to the clutter of papers across the floor.
“Labor omnia vincit,” Cohn replied. Latin again: Work vanquishes all.
Sensing an air of impatience, Abatangelo said, “I’ve got some pictures here. A bit of business, I guess. Shel Beaudry, you remember?”
Cohn flinched a little. “How could I forget?” he said. “You haven’t been in touch with her, of course.” On his desk, a small gold clock chimed discreetly.
“Through an intermediary,” Abatangelo lied. “She took it a little hard the other night.”
Cohn emitted an awkward laugh and sat down. “I suppose I’m going to hear about it.”
Abatangelo took out the pictures of Shel and set them down on the desk. Cohn reached out to collect them, wearing an expression of weary disgust. And yet there was an eagerness about him, too. A curiosity that helped Abatangelo come to a decision.
Driving over, he’d felt half-inclined to give up the notion of making Frank pay for what he’d done to Shel. There were already plenty of hounds out for the kill, though that guaranteed nothing, of course. He’d gathered from what Shel had told him that Frank had an unearthly knack for skating away from his own disasters. But so what? The argument went back and forth in his mind, and as it did he sensed, beneath the abstract moralities at issue, a vaguely sadistic urgency. Seeing Frank suffer, having a hand in it, would feel good. It would scratch a particularly fierce itch. Your motives are hardly pure, he told himself. Think about that.
He was struggling to sort all this out when he looked up and saw Cohn’s hand, strengthened by tennis, reaching across his desk for the photographs. A world came to life in that moment. It was a world in which men such as Cohn- educated, well connected, money in the bank- men who’ve suffered little more than frustration in their lives, enjoy the privilege of viewing photographs of a half-naked, brutally battered woman, doing so as they sit in a lavishly decorated room devoted to costly argument and filled with Third World kitsch. Men like that, they inhabited a realm devoted to one premise: It Isn’t Me. The luckless, the poor, the battered and preyed-upon. The Shel Beaudrys of the world, yearning for a break. They make bad choices. They show poor judgment. Pity the poor fuckers, tsk tsk, but never forget: It isn’t me.
Abatangelo responded to this insight with a bitter sense of helplessness that quickened into fury. The fury told him, in answer to his moral qualms: Do what has to get done. No one else will.
He embellished the story of the dead twins with freakish insinuations. Realizing he was overplaying his hand, he throttled back a little as he described Jill Rosemond, going bar to bar in east CoCo County with her handbills. “Double homicide,” he said, “for starters.” Piecing together what Shel had told him during one of her hourly rousts, he raised the possibility that Frank had been put up to another hit as well, this one on some Mexicans, a sort of disciplinary bang-in from his cranker pals. Shel had gone back to Frank one last time to reason with him, Abatangelo said. She’d tried to get him to find a lawyer, turn himself in. The beating she took was his response. He’d meant to kill her.
“She’s in hiding now,” he said, starting with the truth to ease his uneasiness concerning the lie to follow. “She’s willing to talk to this woman P.I. about the murder of these twins, the other stuff, too, but only through a third party.”
“Me,” Cohn surmised.
“No,” Abatangelo said. “Me. I’m here for my protection, not hers. But yeah, she won’t testify. She won’t dicker with the law. She’ll disappear first. But after what she’s been through I think, she thinks rather, it’s time this Frank guy was brought to task.”
Cohn said nothing. He continued studying the photographs one by one, doing so with an expression of pained indifference.
“For the record,” he asked finally, “you wearing a wire?”
Abatangelo went cold, thinking: Mirabile visu my ass. There’d been a lot written of late about lawyers bankrupted, imprisoned, disbarred or divorced in the wake of a grand jury indictment- typically centered around the testimony of a former client. He figured Cohn was worried he was being set up in some trade for Shel, her freedom in exchange for a lawyer- a lawyer the feds, with their obsessive minds and long memories, would love to destroy. It was nonsense, of course, even insulting. He laughed.
Cohn looked up. “Is that a no?” He wasn’t smiling.
“Yes,” Abatangelo said. “I mean, yes, it’s a no.” He spread his jacket open to reveal its interior. He patted his midriff.
“Don’t be offended,” Cohn said, looking away.
“I read the papers.” Abatangelo let his coattails drop. “I know the trend between attorneys and clients these days.”
“Sorry. I mean that,” Cohn insisted. He shuffled the pictures into a neat stack. “Incidentally, what’s Miss Beaudry doing for money these days?”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“She back in the trade?”
“She’s unemployed.”
“For someone like her,” Cohn said, “that’s a distinction without a difference. As for getting beaten up, you bed down with a speed freak, I’d call that assumption of risk.”
“Bed down?”
“Apparent consent.”
“Look, Tony, I said she wasn’t going to testify.”
“You just want me to pass along information I have no way of knowing is true or even accurate. But I do have a pretty good inkling it’s motivated by revenge.”
“It’s the truth.”
“Is that you talking or this intermediary of yours?”
Abatangelo glanced uneasily toward the dragon in the corner again. He almost imagined it saying: Distinction Without a Difference.
“You shouldn’t even be talking to this woman,” Cohn went on. “Let alone this. Given all you’ve been through, you are a very slow study, mister.”