Hostile Witness (17 page)

He opened his eyes wide and peered at me, to be sure that I understood, and I did.

“Besides, Victor,” he continued, “anything you would do would hurt more than help. That’s simply your destiny. We all have destinies, Victor, and yours is to be a fuckup. Now, in addition to all this, it seems you know a friend of mine.”

“No. I don’t,” I said.

“How do you know who my friends are?” he said, a slash of anger in his voice.

“I don’t, I mean, I’m sorry.”

“Shut up, Victor.”

From the front seat Wayman laughed like a little maniac, first a hoot and then a series of loud snivels.

“This friend is very special to me, do you understand, and I like to keep track of who she is with.”

“She? A her?”

“You are a bright one, aren’t you. This friend of mine,” said Mr. Rogers, “she has this way of…let’s say attaching herself to people. I don’t want her to attach herself to you.”

“Who are we talking about?”

“We aren’t talking,” he said sharply. “I’m talking. Who I’m talking about is Ronnie Ashland. It is all part of the same thing. And what I’m saying is you stay away from her.”

“Veronica?”

“I assume you heard me, then. Any part of what I said you didn’t understand?”

“Why? What’s she to you?”

“He wants to know why, Wayman.”

“It’s not such a swift idea to ask why ‘round here,” said Wayman.

“I’ll tell you why,” said Mr. Rogers in a sweet voice. “Because if you don’t I’m going to hurt you.”

Wayman let out his scary, sniveling laugh again.

“I’m going to hurt you bad.”

“That’s why enough for me,” I said quickly, almost gaily.

“Good, Victor. Maybe you’re not as stupid as you look. Take us home, Wayman.”

“Yessir, Chauncey.”

Mr. Rogers took another sip from his glass of the councilman’s scotch. “You know, Victor, the extra twelve years really do make a difference.”

Wayman pulled the limo into the same spot we had been parked in before and killed the engine. Mr. Rogers finished his drink, put the glass back in the bar, and lifted up the panel.

“I never want to see you again, Victor, so be sure to remember all I told you this evening. If I leave one of my calling cards you’ll know it and I hope for your sake you’ll also know enough to be scared.”

He got out of the car and held the door open for Wayman, who skipped out of the front seat and leaned through the open door and smashed me in the face with the back of his hand.

I grasped my head in my hands and dropped it between my knees. Pain shot from my cheek to my groin and my eyeball stung so much I thought he had popped it and the fluid was running down my cheek. I opened my eyes through the pain and saw a blurry car floor and, with relief that my sight was still there, I heaved loudly and started to vomit.

Wayman remained leaning in the open door as I puked. “Tell me something, Vi’tor Carl,” he said. “You gots to pay more for two first names?” Then he laughed his sniveled laugh once more.

I was still bent double, hand covering my eye, gasping for a clear breath, when Henry came back to the car. “Aw, mon,” he said. “Him a-chucking in the car.”

“Fuck off,” I said.

“Aw, shit, mon, him a-chucking in the car. Councilman Moore, he won’t be liking that at all, mon.”

“Just fuck off.”

As he drove away from the corner the limo’s windows and the roof opened electronically, letting in the cool of the night. The fresh air only made it worse.

MY RIGHT EYE WAS
swollen thick and pretty by the morning, with a dark swath sitting directly atop my cheekbone, fading into a brownish stain that ran like coffee down my cheek. The night before I had fallen into bed with an ice cube wrapped in a towel and that might have helped for a while, but I still woke in my suit pants and shirtsleeves, the towel empty, my sheets wet, the faint taste of vomit in my teeth. When I saw my eye in the mirror I wanted to heave again.

“What happened to you?” asked Ellie when I came into the office that morning.

“I walked into a door,” I said.

“Looks like the door had a left hook.”

“Just do me a favor, all right, Ellie,” I said. “Call up Bill Prescott’s secretary over at Talbott, Kittredge and ask her to send over a copy of the report by some jury-polling service he commissioned for the Moore and Concannon case.”

“Sure thing,” she said. “By the way, I have that address you asked for, the address of Winston Osbourne’s daughter.”

She handed me a handwritten note with an address in Malvern. Malvern, big lawns and old money in the heart of Chester County. I had never been there, but I knew there were horses in Malvern, horses and gentlemen farmers and old stone houses. It was Radnor Hunt country. Not too many synagogues in Malvern, I would bet.

“Perfect,” I said. “Send a copy of our judgment to the Chester County Sheriff’s Office and tell them we think Osbourne’s Duesenberg is parked at that address in Malvern. Get the serial number from the file and tell them we want it seized, immediately. Pay any fees required out of the account.” It was nice to have an account out of which to pay any fees required. Solvency felt better than I ever thought it would.

“What should they do if they find it?” she asked.

“Just have them grab it and hold it for me. I’ll decide then.”

I was behind my desk when Beth came in. “Don’t ask,” I said in response to her query.

“Did you fall down the steps?” she asked.

“Something like that.”

“Were you drinking last night?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Are you having a problem?”

“Yes, but not with my drinking.”

“If you’re having a problem there are people you can see.”

“Stop it, Beth. With what I drink I’d die from hypoglycemia before I became an alcoholic.”

“That eye looks nasty,” she said. “Let me get you something.” She left the office for a moment, coming back with a wet paper towel. “Now close your eyes.”

She patted the wet towel to the puffed flesh just above my cheekbone. I meant to tell her not to, but the cool of the towel was so soothing. With my eyes closed and the dabbing coolness and Beth’s perfume, a sweet and floral mixture that reminded me of someone, I couldn’t remember who, but someone with whom I had once been in love, the whole mixture of sensations took me right out of that office, right out of my present. I was disappointed when she finally stopped.

“That was great,” I said.

She gave me the towel and I continued to dab, but now I was back in my office, back in my life, and it didn’t feel half so good. “How’s your investigation going?” she asked.

“I’ve been called off.”

“By who?”

“By Moore and Prescott and my client.”

“I bet you were called off by Moore and Prescott and your client sort of went along.”

“Sort of.”

“So what are you going to do?”

“Exactly what I’ve been told to do,” I said. “Absolutely nothing other than cashing my checks.”

“Nothing is pretty hard to do sometimes,” she said.

“Not this time,” I didn’t want to tell her about Chuckie Lamb’s threats or Mr. Rogers’s warnings. She’d look at the situation perfectly sensibly and have me do something like tell the police or withdraw from the case and I didn’t want to do either. What I wanted to do was to stay far away from trouble and I knew how to do it, too. I would ask no more questions about Bissonette’s murder or the missing quarter of a million. I would sit quietly at the trial and collect my fees and each night go home, alone, like a good little boy, and wait for my prosperity. I would make no waves. That would satisfy Prescott and Jimmy and Chuckie and the strange Mr. Rogers. What I wanted to do was to forget the complications that were rising like flood waters about me. What I wanted to do was float safely through the fall into winter and put all this behind me. What I wanted to do was…

My phone rang.

“There’s someone here to see you,” said Rita, our receptionist.

“You’re supposed to tell me who is here to see me,” I said into the phone. “That’s in the job description.”

“Well, whoever it is, he looks like a short Rasputin if Rasputin had eaten too much chocolate pudding.”

“Find out who it is, Rita.”

Over the phone I could hear her ask, “Who are you, anyway?” and the mumble of an answer.

“Morris Kapustin,” she said.

“Oh, right, the private eye.”

“Funny. He doesn’t look like a private eye,” Rita said over the phone, and, as usual, Rita was right.

Morris Kapustin was a short, very heavy man with a long beard peppered gray and a wide-brimmed black hat. He wore a suit badly and he was sweating badly and he breathed with the slight wheeze common to the badly overweight. From out of his pants, over his belt, flowed four sets of cotton strings. He flapped his arms as he walked into the office and without my asking he let out a high pitched “Whoooh” and dropped into a chair across from me. He sat down so hard a clock on my desk rattled on its base. His little feet barely touched the floor as he sat. He took off his black hat and wiped his forehead with a crumpled and stained handkerchief. Atop his mass of disheveled hair was a yarmulke.

“This office, it never heard from elevators? I’m
shvitzing
from the stairs. And it’s October, yet. If it was July you’d have to wring out the carpet. Morris Kapustin. And you’re Carl?”

“I’m Victor Carl,” I said, reaching out to shake his damp, pudgy hand. He lightly squeezed the ends of my fingers.

“Accht, that Benny. I didn’t mean to be rude, forgive me, I thought Carl was your first name. All Benny said was that I should meet his lawyer, Carl, at ten on Friday. I thought Carl was the lawyer’s first name. That Benny, I love him, but sometimes he’s so
farchadat
it is a miracle he doesn’t walk into a bus.”

“That’s all right. This is my partner, Beth Derringer.” He didn’t shake her hand.

“I’m pleased that I should meet you both. Especially
the pretty lady, no offense to you, Carl. No, Victor, right? No offense to you, Victor, but in mine business, all day it’s grumpy old men shouting about thieves. It’s enough to give a headache the size of Pittsburgh. Accht, you don’t want to hear mine
tsouris.
Benny Lefkowitz said that you needed help. He didn’t tell me the what for. That Benny, he’s read too much Philip Marlowe. He’s always yelling after me, ‘Off to catch the crooks, hey, Morris?’ I say yes, when really all I’m after is a pastrami on rye. He’s lucky to have such a business, Benny, and the money he makes, it hurts just to think it, but he likes to imagine I lead a glamorous life, so I let him.”

He wiped his forehead again with the handkerchief, looking as glamorous as a piece of herring.

“I need a towel is what I need,” he said. “They should make for me a handkerchief towel. Such an idea, a handkerchief of terry cloth, for
shtik fetah
like me who
shvitz
even in October. I have family in the
shmatte
business, I know from what I’m talking. We’ll make a fortune, just the three of us.” He turned to Beth and winked. “We’ll retire to Haifa, sit on our balcony all day, catch a breeze off the Mediterranean, sip slivovitz out of clean little glasses. Don’t tell anyone our idea, the
gonifs
will steal it in a second. A second. I know, I have family in the business. Bigger crooks they don’t have on post office walls. Now, Victor, Benny said I should be meeting with you. So we’re meeting.”

“I think there may have been a mistake.”

“We weren’t supposed to meet today? I wrote it down, I thought, but he spoke to me only yesterday.” He reached into his suit jacket with his right hand, pulling out a little black notebook, while at the same time he searched an inside pocket with his left hand, extracting a pair of wire glasses, the ends of which he slipped over his ears. With a lick of his thumb he started through the notebook. It was as
disheveled as he, loose papers of every sort poking out from its covers. “Morris, Morris, you’re growing so
famisht,
Morris. I was certain it was today.”

“No, Mr. Kapustin, our meeting was for today. You were right about that. But I don’t think you’re going to be able to help us.”

“Good, I was right about the day. Sometimes there’s so much it’s hard to keep track, and I get more and more confused. But at least I was right about the day, at least that. It’s been a week, you don’t want to know about mine week, believe me, so I thought the mistake it was maybe mine, but no. See, right here.” He poked at a loose piece of paper. “Ten o’clock, Friday. Carl. Now that’s cleared up. Good.” He closed the book and took off his glasses and stared at me with a squint. “So, Carl, tell me exactly why I won’t be able to help you.”

“What we needed,” I said, “was to find a man who doesn’t want to be found.”

“Such luck you’re in, then, that’s what I do. What I do, Victor, what Benny thinks is so glamorous, is that I find people, swindlers, crooks,
gonifs
who have taken off with a diamond or an emerald or the money from a cash register. You wouldn’t believe how many times a jeweler unwraps his diamond and finds it’s been switched. These are professionals, too. There is something about the way it shines, I don’t know, but it attracts thieves, all out to steal from each other. Not Benny of course, he’s an
edel mensch,
but the others. Me, I never cared so much for diamonds. Too easy to lose, I know. Mine wife, Rosalie, don’t even try to buy her a diamond. She doesn’t want to know from diamonds, Rosalie. Zero coupon bonds, yes. Diamonds, no. So Victor, this man you’re looking for, he’s a swindler?”

“Yes, actually.”

“Well, then, there’s no such mistake, no such mistake at all. Tell me who he is, what he did, his friends, everything
you know, and I’ll find him. I’m no Houdini, but then who did Houdini ever find, huh?”

“But the fellow we’re looking for, Mr. Kapustin, is not Jewish.”

“Good. It hurts me here,” he pounded his chest, “whenever it’s a Jew I’m looking for, and you wouldn’t believe me if I told you how many times I been hurt right here. It’s a sin. And you know who I blame? Accht, you don’t want to know.”

“Mr. Kapustin, with all due respect, I just don’t think this job is for you.”

“No?”

“To be honest, I didn’t realize when Mr. Lefkowitz gave me your name that you were an Orthodox Jew. I guess working in the jewelry business, in which a lot of Orthodox Jews are involved, it makes sense because you can move within that world. But we’re not looking for a Hassid here.”

He leaned forward. “Believe me when I tell you this. It’s not only the Jews who steal. When it comes to stealing we’re such
pisherkeh,
the things we can still learn. You’ll be glad to know, Mr. Victor, that Morris Kapustin does not just find Jews. You name it and Morris Kapustin has found it. Just last week, an Armenian boy, cleaning up at Grossman’s, grabbed from the register and ran. I found him in Teaneck, Teaneck of all places. Who would think, an Armenian thief in Teaneck.”

“I’m sorry, Mr. Kapustin,” I said. “We’ll find a different agency to hire. Thank you for understanding.”

“Wait just a moment, Mr. Kapustin,” said Beth.

“A moment I have,” he said.

Beth pulled me outside my office. We left Morris Kapustin sitting in the chair, staring out my narrow window, pulling distractedly at his beard. Beth closed the door behind us and turned loose a fierce expression on me.

“What are you doing?” she whispered angrily.

“I’ll get someone else, one of those high-tech private eye firms that advertise in the
Legal.
”

“You’re not going to give him the job because he’s a Jew?”

“It’s not in his field. Our guy is in Buenos Aires somewhere, not Crown Heights.”

“I don’t think that’s it at all, Victor. He’s as qualified as anyone. But you don’t like the way he looks, do you?”

“Well, he’s no Don Johnson.”

“Or the way he talks.”

“What are you getting at?”

“I think you don’t want to hire him because he’s too Jewish.”

“Oh, come on.”

“No, really, Victor. And this isn’t the first time I noticed it. What is it with you?”

I never knew what it was with me, but I knew even as I denied it that she was absolutely right. I doubted whether this Morris Kapustin could do the job, but in reality I didn’t care. I’d just as soon Stocker not be found, so that I could get the settlement and take my cut and be done with the case. But I had to admit feeling a touch of revulsion at the sight of Morris Kapustin, sweating that very moment in my office, with his Orthodox hat and tangled beard and the dirty cotton
tzitzis
that flowed over his belt. The great firms in the city from which I sought acceptance would not hire the likes of Morris Kapustin to investigate their cases.

I had often wondered if my failure to land a job in the firms of my choosing was due to my religion. It was no longer like the old days, of course, when the Drinker of Drinker, Biddle decried the influx of “Russian Jew boys” into the law, men who had risen “up from the gutter and were merely following the methods their fathers had been using in selling shoestrings,” when the Bar Association thought up the barrier of its prefectorship to
handle what McCracken of Montgomery, McCracken called “the question of the social origins of men.” Aspiring Jewish lawyers in those years who could actually find a prefector to sponsor them were either tapped for the Jewish firm, Wolf, Block, or forced to chew the legal scraps tossed them by their betters, petty crimes and bankruptcies and slip and falls. Do I sound bitter? Now Jews are hired everywhere, in moderate quantities, as long as they dress appropriately and speak without spitting and don’t answer questions with questions or sprinkle Yiddish in their conversations. But though I had mastered those qualifications, I still hadn’t been able to crack that crowd. In one great moment of clarity the holders of the keys had judged the Jew before them and in a collective voice had said, “Sorry, no.”