Hostile Witness (31 page)

“And that was me,” I said bitterly. The cabana boy.

“He told me it was my only choice. That if it works right it will make the government’s case look so weak we might both get off.” Jimmy took a deep drag from the cigarette and let it out slowly. “So I told him to go ahead.”

“Even if Chester ended up behind bars for good.”

“What do you think, I like this? I don’t have a choice. No choice at all. We’re in a war here, fighting to build something grand and noble, but as in any war there will be casualties. Concannon might be one. I’ll take care of Chet, and he knows it. But my enemies are coming after me. I won’t let them win. If they do, it is the children who will pay the price. We need you to stick with us, to follow Prescott’s direction and foil the government’s plot against me. I brought you here so you would be aware of all you are endangering if you oppose us. Together we can make a difference.” He flicked his cigarette onto a tuft of weeds sprouting through cracked brick and it smoldered there. “If you want, I’ll put you on the board of CUP. A terrific position for a young lawyer. Together we can change the world for the better.”

That would be a terrific position for me, I knew. It was on charitable boards and political committees that lawyers
found clients. Serve on enough boards, get enough clients, and you become a rainmaker, with the power to go to any firm in the city and name a price. I didn’t jump right away onto my hind legs and say, “Okay,” but I was thinking.

“So who killed him?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” he spit out. “God, I wish I did. You’re the man with the theories, you find out. See if you can do any better than we did.”

I looked out over the vacant lot and then the neighborhood. There was something eerily familiar about it. “What number is this?” I asked.

“Nineteenth Street.”

Now I knew where I was. The old baseball stadium had been a block away. Connie Mack Stadium. Where the park had been was now a big modern brick church, like a giant McDonald’s, but when it had still been a ballyard my grandfather had brought me there to watch the Phillies play. He called it Shibe Park, its old name. We’d sit in the bleachers and chant, “Go Phillies Go,” and watch Willie Mays beat the hell out of the home team. Richie Allen and Clay Dalrymple, Jim Bunning and Johnny Callison. And Gene Mauch sitting in the dugout, his dark face in the pained squint that became permanent after the team collapsed in ’64. But what I remembered right then was not just the baseball but the young boy holding his grandfather’s hand, walking past the parked cars on 20th Street to get into the park. How had he become me?

“Where’s the rest of the money?” I asked, suddenly tired of the dog-and-pony show, tired of Jimmy Moore’s self-righteousness. “The missing quarter-million.”

“I don’t know,” he said, his arm spreading over his vacant lot. “But it’s going to end up here, I’ll make damn sure of it, and in the others we will build. I’m working on it as we speak.”

“Mr. Raffaello wants his share.”

“Not a penny,” he shouted. “They sell their poison right
under his nose and it’s fine so long as he gets his cut. He’s a disgrace. I’d sooner die.”

“I’m sure he could arrange it.”

“Let him try. If he wants a war that’s what he’ll get.” He pointed a thick finger at me. “I’m ready to take him on and take on anyone else who gets in my way. We’re going to fill this vacant lot and fourteen like it with facilities that will heal a generation. It is my mission, and I will do anything to protect it. Anything. My mission is all I have left to care about now.”

I guess it all was getting to me, the false nobility, the lies, the inevitable bribes, a deal here, a settlement there, a position on an influential board. Was it so clear that I could be bought, was a “
FOR SALE
” sign printed on my face, unmistakable above my watery eyes. I hated it, especially here, where I felt haunted by the little shoe merchant and the young boy holding his hand. I couldn’t help my anger from bubbling out. Even so, I might have kept quiet if his prick hadn’t been so damned thick. But when he got all self-righteous on me I thought of the sight of him in that cold shower and I got even angrier and I said, “But that’s not the only thing to still care about, is it, councilman?”

“What else could there be?” he asked, his voice as plaintive as if there could be nothing.

“Fucking Veronica,” I said.

I regretted it immediately, regretted it all the more when he turned his startled face to me. It was twisted strangely into a mask that proclaimed both helplessness and need and, for the first time since I met him, Jimmy Moore was speechless.

But from what Veronica had told me and from the mask on Jimmy Moore’s face I could piece it all together. Still in a rage from his daughter’s death, he bursts into a crack house and sees her on the floor, helpless and high, about the same age as his daughter would have been, this pretty young girl on drugs, as pretty as his daughter. She
might even have looked like her. And he shelters her in his car and takes her to a treatment center and saves her life, like he had been unable to save his daughter’s life. And he visits her, his surrogate, and he makes sure she is cured, and bit by bit some deep desire starts rising from the forbidden, locked portions of his soul and he finds that he can’t help himself, the unthinkable has become real, the impossible had become inevitable, and it is finer than any imagining.

YOU CAN LEARN EVERYTHING
about a man by learning what he truly wants. I had seen the bricks and glass of Jimmy Moore’s greatest ambitions; they dwarfed my own in grandeur and worth. I felt a strange, sad sympathy for Moore, with his grand dreams of healing and his own hopeless love for Veronica Ashland, both built on a foundation of tragedy, and truly I hoped his grand dreams could all come true. But not over the rotting carcass of my client.

“We need to talk,” I said into the pay phone, taking no chances on a tap.

“My office, at five,” said Slocum.

“Forget it,” I said. “Last time I went there it made the front page of the
Daily News.
”

“You got some heat, huh?”

“Like Las Vegas in August.”

“Never been.”

“Hot,” I said. “Let’s find a bar.”

“Dublin Inn?”

“Too many ADAs. How about Chaucer’s?”

“Fine,” he said. “Make it later then. Eight o’clock. Something interesting?”

“You’ll think so,” I said, and I knew he would.

See, Prescott made a mistake, really. Had he treated me with the respect I craved, had he taken me to lunch as his guest at the Union League, at the Philadelphia Club, had
he welcomed me with open arms into the fraternity of success, I might have sat quietly, willingly, and let Concannon eat whatever shit Prescott served him. But the bastard had threatened me, given me orders, turned me into his cabana boy, and that was his mistake. In the rush of my late-night prowlings with Jimmy Moore and his entourage, of my society functions, of my mentorship with Prescott, of my sexual obsession with Veronica, of my work and play with the Bishop brothers, of this new life that had seemingly been granted me, in the midst of it all I had lost my resentment for a while. But it was back, with a vengeance. It slipped over my shoulders like a favorite old sweater and it felt damn good. Even if the orders from my client prohibited me from actively engaging in the trial, even if my cut of the
Saltz
settlement and my deals with the Bishops and my directorship of CUP required my formal obeisance in court to Prescott, even if all that, my resentment still demanded I do something, anything, something, no matter the consequence. Concerning the mystery of who killed Bissonette, Jimmy Moore had said, “You’re the man with the theories, you find out.” So maybe I would.

What I had discovered from Raffaello was that Bissonette might have been killed because he was playing around with the wrong woman, so now all I had to do was find Bissonette’s final fatal love. Lauren Amber Guthrie and her jangling gold bracelets? Maybe. Some other woman with a husband bent for revenge? Possibly. Or was it Chuckie Lamb after all, silencing the one witness who could connect him to everything? And what about the missing quarter of a million dollars, two-fifths of which was owed to Enrico Raffaello and the rest of the downtown boys? I wanted answers and quickly, before Eggert started nailing the shingles on the roof of the jail Prescott was building around Chester Concannon and before Raffaello started pressing me for information. Which is why I had
called the man with the grand jury subpoenas, my old friend K. Lawrence Slocum, ADA.

Chaucer’s was a friendly sort of neighborhood saloon with a famous shuffle bowling game, cheap paneling, stained-glass windows in the doors, and deep booths where groups of kids right out of college could sit and drink pitchers and gossip about other kids right out of college. When I first started going there it was filled with older, blue-collar types, with truck drivers, with lesbians who dressed like truck drivers, with college dropouts who ruefully discussed their dubious futures. But it no longer had that type of charm. Now the boys wore their baseball caps backwards, ponytails spilling out beneath the brims, the girls sheathed their long legs in black leotards, and they were all college graduates, discussing their dubious futures with pride. I still drank there, but now I felt too old to be a part and that was scary and sad both. I still remembered when it was a thrill just to be inside a bar, when the soft lighting and cigarette smoke and strangers on the stools whispered something so seductive I couldn’t believe I could just walk in, sit down, and order a beer. But now I was one of the older and the sadder and the people slipping in were younger, gayer, more vibrant than I. Now I knew what the older people in the bars used to think of me because I knew what I thought of this new generation. I wished they all would just go home to their mamas.

Slocum and I were sitting in one of those deep booths toward the rear of the bar. The waitress had given us each a bottle of Rolling Rock and a glass and each of us had ignored the glass. I almost liked Slocum. He took it all very seriously, as one would want a public prosecutor to take it all very seriously, but he had a sense of humor, too. It was a weary sense of humor, that was the only type a prosecutor would ever allow himself, but even a weary
sense of humor put him leagues ahead of the rest. I told him the whole story of my meeting with Raffaello, although I left out the part where he called his daughter a slut. I still remembered that Jasper and Dominic believed nothing was as important as keeping one’s word, and though I almost liked Slocum, I wasn’t willing to bet my life on whether or not he had a connection to Raffaello. Everyone else seemed to in this burg.

“He said it was a jealous husband?” asked Slocum.

“He didn’t give me specifics.”

“So right now it’s just a mystery girl.”

“Right,” I said.

“And you want me to check it out?”

“Yes.”

“To send out my detectives to find that girl?”

“That would be terrific.”

“You want me to send out my detectives to find this mystery girl, the existence of whom was disclosed by the biggest criminal in the city, all in an effort to destroy my murder case against your client.”

“Exactly.”

“I don’t think so.”

“Larry, an innocent man is getting railroaded here.”

“Or maybe Raffaello’s lying. You ever consider that gangsters sometimes lie? Nothing happens in this town without him getting a cut. Maybe he was part of the whole thing and now he’s throwing out false leads to take the heat off his
compares.
”

“I don’t believe that,” I said. “Not for a minute. What I believe is that you’ve got the wrong guys facing death row and you don’t want to admit it.”

He shrugged, like he wasn’t certain that I was wrong. “Maybe, Carl. It happens. But you’re going to have to do your own investigating. How much you getting an hour for this case? No, don’t tell me, it’ll just make me ill. Earn your money, find the girl yourself.” He rubbed his hand
over his mouth and looked at me for a moment. “But maybe I can help.”

I just stared at him and waited.

He leaned forward and lowered his voice. “All right, I’m going to tell you something. I’m telling you this because I think there’s a chance, small, but a chance you may be right. But if it comes back in my face in some motion or in a newspaper article I’m going to be very disappointed, do you understand? And you don’t want to disappoint me.”

He paused and took a drink from his beer.

“When we showed you the physical evidence,” he continued, “we didn’t show you everything. There was a book.”

“Shakespeare?” I asked.

“More like Ma Bell.”

“A phone book?”

“A personal phone book.”

“You withheld Bissonette’s little black book?”

“Now don’t get like that,” he said, raising a hand in protest. “The office made a determination that it wasn’t appropriate to release Bissonette’s personal phone book, as it might tend to embarrass certain, how should I phrase this, certain well-known and highly placed women in the city. These women and their families have privacy rights. This wasn’t like a hooker’s book with the names of her johns. There were no crimes committed here.”

“So there’s this book.” I pressed on.

“You want another beer?”

“Tell me about the book.”

“I’d like another beer.”

I raised my hand for the waitress like I was in grade school and ordered two more Rocks when she came. “All right,” I said. “Tell me about the book.”

“Well, this book has the names of the usual suspects, a lot of women with reputations.”

“Let me see the book.”

“Are you listening to me, Carl? I said we’re not disclosing the book. There are names in there that if you saw them your jaw would drop to your knees, world-famous singers, athletes, wives of heavy politicians.”

“Like Councilman Fontelli’s.”

“This was his book. But there aren’t just phone numbers there. He rated them, gave them stars, one to five, like a damn critic.”

“Just like a baseball player to be obsessed with statistics. But that’s good, then,” I said. “We can use that book to find the girl he fell in love with. She was a five-star for sure.”

“There’s more than one five-star name.”

“Just give me the five stars to check on, then.”

“Some are just initials, some without numbers.”

“Well, whoever this mystery woman is, it’s someone in the book,” I said. “A man falls in love, he puts the number in his book.”

“You sound like you have a book of your own, Carl.”

“More like a few paper slips with hand-scrawled numbers.”

“You ever find a number you don’t know whose it is?” asked Slocum, taking a long gulp from his beer, his eyes, behind his thick glasses, showing amusement.

“All the time.”

“What do you do then?”

“I call it. ‘Hello, anyone there single and under fifty-five?’”

“Oh man,” he said. “I can’t tell you how glad I am to be married.”

The waitress came with two more Rolling Rocks, the green long-necked bottles fogged with cold. “Two more,” I said.

“So this is what I’m offering here,” said Slocum after the waitress left. “You give me the name of any women
whose possible involvement you’re investigating and I’ll tell you if she’s in the book and her rating. You can take it from there.”

“Linda Marie Raffaello Fontelli.”

“Three stars,” he said. “I would have figured more with all that practice…”

“How about Lauren Amber Guthrie?” I said quickly.

“Where did that name come from?”

“I recognized her photograph in the love box.”

“And you withheld relevant information about a homicide from me?” He shook his head at me sadly. “I’ll let you know if she’s in there tomorrow. Any others, you just give me a call.”

“Tell me something else,” I said. “Tell me what you know about a drug dealer named Norvel Goodwin.”

He stared at me for a long moment, took a drink from his beer, and then stared at me some more. “What the hell are you into?” he asked finally.

I shrugged.

“Norvel Goodwin,” he said, shaking his head. “One of the worst. We’re onto him, but he’s tough as hell and he’s got a good lawyer. Bolignari.”

“Tony Baloney,” I said. “I have a case with him.”

“Well, no matter how good a lawyer Tony is, it’s only a matter of time. You don’t step up like he is stepping up without paying for it. He was big in West Philly for a while and then dropped out of sight.”

“When Jimmy Moore burned him out?” I asked.

He gave me another long look. “That’s right. Now he’s back. There’s been a lot of violence in the East Kensington Badlands as he pushes his way into other people’s territories. Fights over street corners. The five-year-old who got a bullet in her head last week, cover of all the papers?”

“That was terrible.”

“That was Goodwin. A stray bullet from just another
fight over another corner. But all of a sudden Goodwin has a lot of muscle and he’s taking over a lot of territory. He’s a stone-cold killer.” He shook his head. “What the hell are you into now, Victor?”

I wouldn’t have told him even if I knew.