I wave this off, and gesture to the seat on the other side of the table.
I don’t get the Wolfman routine this afternoon. Instead Clem is looking over his shoulder, worried what his friends might think if they see him consorting with the enemy in the midst of trial. He tells me I am too hot at the moment for the normal social chitchat of this place. Lama, he says, wants a pound of flesh, and while merchants in Venice might settle for my heart, according to Clem, Jimmy wants to start at the soft underside of my genitals.
‘What did you do to get him so pissed off?’ he asks. ‘Ranting and raving all over the office,’ he tells me. ‘Jimmy has trouble deciding whose name to take in vain, yours, or as he puts it, “that cunt” they forced him to work with.’
Clem looks at me. ‘Who’s trying the case?’ he says.
‘Morgan Cassidy,’ I tell him.
‘Oh.’ Nothing more, like maybe Clem concurs in Lama’s initial assessment.
Clem wants to go for one of the back booths, where we can talk in private. Not be disturbed, as he says.
We do it. The waitress comes up. Clem orders a boilermaker. I do grapefruit juice.
‘On the wagon?’ he says.
I have to pick up Sarah from the baby-sitter’s in a few minutes. I tell him this and he nods like he understands. Since Nikki’s death I have a heightened sense of responsibility for my daughter, and a whole new appreciation for single parents. I have often wondered about the things that stick in a kid’s mind as they grow older and realize that there is a darker seam to life, that the smell that always seemed to float about Dad’s head like an ether was not Aqua Velva after all.
‘Did you hear about Louis Cousins?’ he says.
Cousins, the kid on trial across the hall from us, was convicted on two counts of first-degree murder a week ago.
I shake my head.
‘Jury came back an hour ago.’ Clem extends his arm straight out in a fist, then turns it over and does a thumbs-down gesture like Caesar. ‘Death,’ he says.
I cannot say that I am surprised by this. Psychological defenses rooted in allegations of childhood abuses have been trotted out all too often of late, and overexposed in the press. Like knock-off Colonials in a housing tract, they are losing their impact.
The implication for us, however, is that the press will now be free. We will be garnering a larger share of the attention, which I could just as well do without.
Clem’s in no hurry. I think he figures I’m good for a dozen drinks. I will buy him a gift certificate at the bar and let him carouse with his friends.
‘What did you find out?’ I ask him.
‘Nothing on the picture,’ he says. ‘Struck out on all counts.’ Clem is talking about the photo given to me by Dana of the man known as Lyle Simmons, who if she is right was the triggerman seen with Jack in the bar across the river — the courier who delivered the bomb to the post office — and the guy who took out the Merlows. I would have figured, being that busy, he would have had a record to rival Capone.
‘We checked all the aliases,’ he says. ‘Without prints…’ He makes a face like dream on. ‘Which brings us to the other matter.’
He’s talking about the fingerprint of Kathy Merlow from the tube of paint I palmed off the grass during our encounter in Hawaii.
‘Took almost an hour on the computer.’ This doesn’t sound like much, but on the high-speed automated system of scanning an hour is a lifetime. ‘We got a hit,’ he says.
Clem pulls a slip of paper from his pocket. ‘One Carla Leopold, born Paterson, New Jersey, August twenty-six, nineteen and-’
‘Save the background, let’s cut to the chase,’ I tell him.
‘This is the good part,’ he says. ‘Honors graduate, Columbia, degree in accountancy.’
‘You sure we’re talking about the same woman?’
He gives me a big grin. ‘Employed by one of the large accounting firms in New York City, five years’ experience. Next employer Regal International Trading Consortium, corporate accountant and bookkeeper. Employed two years.’
‘Where is this leading us?’ I ask him.
‘Bear with me,’ he says. ‘Regal is one of the new line of trading and investment houses. They make their money the new and improved way.’
‘How’s that?’
‘They launder it,’ says Clem.
He sits looking at me, big round eyes across the table, like how’s them apples?
The waitress arrives with our drinks. Clem starts slurping the foam off his iced mug. I give the woman payment and a tip and she leaves us.
‘Word is you got narco-dollars, Regal International will buy you a piece of the rock,’ says Clem. ‘They do Rumpelstiltskin and his straw routine one better. They turn white shit that goes up somebody else’s nose into tax-free-no-load muni bonds. Or at least they did until two years ago.’
‘What happened?’
He takes a drink of draft, knowing he has my attention now.
‘IRS and Justice came down around their ears. Full-court press. Indicted all the principals. Tried to get them to roll over on their clients. On the theory that you always follow the money, they called in your girl Carla.’
I’m giving him funny faces, not exactly tracking on where he’s headed.
‘Seems with the heat on, her former employers had funny notions about downsizing. Layoffs were done off a barge, after a cement facial, somewhere up the Hudson. Two of her cohorts, other bean counters, went the way of the disappeared,’ he says. ‘Ms. Leopold suddenly realized her career options were being limited. She agreed to testify in return for some kind of a deal. She copped a plea, mail fraud, conspiracy, and racketeering, multiple counts. That’s how her prints showed up in the computer,’ he says. ‘In return she was supposed to get sanctuary.’
‘Supposed to?’ I say.
‘She never got the benefit of the bargain.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean she’d be thirty-three if she was still alive.’
Clem knows about her death. I am wondering how.
‘An auto accident on the Jersey Turnpike in the middle of a blizzard,’ says Clem. ‘A year ago last November.’
With this I am sitting bolt upright. I nearly choke on grapefruit juice as the acid singes my throat.
‘Body burned beyond recognition. Car went up like a fucking buzz-bomb. Word is, it may have been an o.c. hit.’ Clem’s jargon for the underbelly of life — organized crime.
He is asking me where I got the fingerprint on the paint tube. According to Clem, the guy who ran the check on the computer for him at State Justice is now curious.
I dodge this with a lot of verbal feints and weaves, and finally distract him with a question.
‘Are you sure about the print, couldn’t be a mistake?’ I say.
‘No way. Positive make,’ he tells me. ‘Matches on more than a dozen points of comparison. Little ridges that don’t lie.’
Clem’s still waiting for an answer about where I got the print. He may have to wait until hell freezes.
At this moment I am certain that my face is a mask of glazed expressions as I conjure the enigma that was Kathy Merlow, and a whole new universe of unanswered questions.
I see apparitions, the chalked and powdery complexion of death, visions of Nikki as I saw her alone on that last day to press the wedding band on her finger for the final time, alone among the tubes and tanks and other instruments of horror in the back rooms of the funeral parlor. Visions of Nikki laid out in white satin. It is an image I relive with regularity, though now it is invaded by other more disturbing pictures. The synapses of the brain trying to sort sense from confusion. Another face, images of fiery death, and Kathy Merlow. Somehow these two, Nikki and Merlow, have become snarled in my mind, as I am restrained, caught up, lathered in sweat. Flames, and a tangle of twisted metal on some unrecognized roadway. Blood on matted bedsheets, the palm trees of Hana, and a pitched ringing, relentless, insistent in my ears. Images give way to sound, Nikki and Kathy Merlow, faces fade as my brain finally sorts fact from phantasm. I roll over, untangle myself from the sheets of my bed, and pull the receiver from the phone. The ringing stops. Nightmares that pass for slumber.