Hostile Witness (37 page)

There was a long silence between us, ably filled by the television set, an interview with an old entertainer, Morley Safer shaking his head over and over in amazement. Then, without turning from the television, my father spoke.

“Take the money,” he said.

He coughed loudly, hacking something big and weighty into the paper towel.

“Take the money,” he said. “It don’t come around that often.”

There was another long pause as a string of commercials played out and then the annoying skirl of Andy Rooney. My father switched the channel, surfing to find something, ending back in failure with Andy Rooney. Rooney had a pile of products before him and he was reading the labels.

“That’s what you could do on television,” he said. “You could whine as good as him.”

“You ever have a chance for real money?” I asked.

There was a long pause before he said, “Marty Sokowsky.”

“I don’t know him.”

“Sokowsky Chevrolet and Subaru out on 611. I grew up with Sokowsky in Logan. Right out of high school he had a proposition for me. Meat. He was going into the meat business, you know, not growing meat or chopping meat but selling meat. He wanted to be a salesman.”

“What kind of meat?”

“Pigs, cows, chicken, meat. The whole thing was a little shady, you know, selling second quality as first, bait and switch, it wasn’t nothing about meat, really, it was about sucking out the money. I wasn’t sure about it and the idea of telling your grandfather that I was selling pork was too much. I had decided on the army anyway, so I said no. Well, Sokowsky just misses getting indicted but he makes a ton, goes on to buy a car dealership where he is minting money, just minting money, and I come back from the army and start cutting lawns for that
schmuck
Aaronson. I missed out. It could have been Sokowsky-Carl Chevrolet and Subaru, that could have been me. Everything would have been different had I had a car dealership. I been waiting here for another chance ever since, but nothing never came. So what I learned is that with screwups like us it only comes around once and when it comes take it. No matter who you have to fuck.”

When the slangy little music for
Murder She Wrote
came on I told my father I had to leave. He followed me to the door.

“Take the money,” he said.

“Yes, I heard you.”

“You ever hear from her?” he asked quietly.

“Now and then. She’s taken up golf.”

“I’m not surprised,” he said bitterly. “I think her whole life she aspired to golf. She wanted me to join Philmont
Country Club, the ritzy Jewish place down Huntingdon Pike. You know what that fucking place costs? Sokowsky belongs there.”

“She tells me to say hello.”

“I don’t want to hear it.”

“I know.”

“The bums are in Dallas next week. They’re going to get killed in Dallas.”

“Are you inviting me?”

“No, I was just saying.”

“’Cause if you’re inviting me.”

“I’m not inviting you. Shut up. I’ll be busy anyway.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. I got a tee-off time at Merion. Tell the bitch I’m taking it up too.”

It was a sad drive out of Hollywood and the suburbs and back into the city. My father was dying but that wasn’t what was sad. I drove right up Broad Street, through the worst parts of North Philadelphia, bombed-out moviehouses, boarded-up stores, congregants of the homeless under elevated train bridges. I drove through Temple University and past the
Philadelphia Inquirer
building and then right around City Hall, past that building that had been decimated by fire but was still standing, a high-rise shell with plywood for windows, and I felt sad the whole way. It wasn’t my father’s certain future that was upsetting me so, it was the uncertainty of his past. But it had been a good visit; it had clarified things. My father had always been a barometer for me, the rebellions of my youth only mattered in relation to him. He was quiet, so I talked too damn much. He was uncomplaining, so I complained. He wore his hair in a crew cut, mine flowed past my shoulders all through high school. He was a laborer, I became a lawyer. He was poor, I would be rich. But I wouldn’t be rich his way. “Take the money,” he had said, and in those three swift words he had pointed out my direction as clear
as a road sign. “Take the money,” he had said, and I would, but not his way. I wanted nothing of my life to be his way.

Jimmy Moore had killed Zack Bissonette. I knew that with as much certainty as my father knew the Eagles were bums. Jimmy had gone to that club looking for Zack Bissonette and when he found him he grabbed a baseball bat from a display on the wall and with it he beat Bissonette senseless, faceless, comatose, beat him to death. Even as I cleaned up the dachshund mess, scrubbed the bloodstains from Tony Baloney’s wooden desktop and leather blotter with Murphy’s Oil, even then I could see it all, the flashing bat, the fury in Jimmy Moore’s face, the blood bubbling as Bissonette breathed through it. And with a little luck I could prove it all happened just like that, too. I knew what it would cost me. Blaine, Cox, Amber and Cox would not be calling. The Bishop brothers would not be calling. My sweet forty-thousand-dollar cut of the
Saltz
settlement would not be resting gently in my bank account. From affluence to poverty in the blink of an eye.

But all my life I had resented the fact that what I had wished for had not been bestowed upon me. My father had not been rich, the law firms had not been hiring, that slam-bam-in-your-face case had never come walking in my door. I had been waiting too long for someone to give me my share. Enough already of waiting. Jimmy Moore had said America was not about what was bestowed but about what was grabbed, and now I was grabbing. Make no mistake, I still wanted it all, the money, the prestige, the best tables, the best cars, the youngest and prettiest women. But I wouldn’t end up like my father, embittered because the myth of opportunity had not come knocking on my door. By going up against Jimmy Moore I would surely be losing that which was being bestowed upon me by William Prescott, but I didn’t want to be given anything by anybody anymore. What would Clarence Darrow, the greatest
trial lawyer of all time, what would Darrow have done in my situation? What would Lincoln have done, or Daniel Webster, or Andrew Hamilton, the first of the great Philadelphia lawyers? They each would have spit in Prescott’s eye and then gone out and taken what was rightfully theirs. They didn’t rely on gifts bestowed, and no longer would I.

So this is what I would do. I would shit on Blaine, Cox, Amber and Cox. I would shit on the Bishop brothers, on CUP, on the goddamn defendants in
Saltz v. Metropolitan Investors,
on Norvel Goodwin and his bloody calling cards. I would convince Chester Concannon to let me fight for his freedom and then I would take down Jimmy Moore. And in taking down Jimmy Moore I would make a name for myself. I would win the case for Chester Concannon, I’d save his life, I would, and when I did I’d shout it to the press and watch the clients come roaring in. I would seize opportunity by the neck and wring it, oh yes. I would make a name for myself and from my name, and no one else’s, would flow my power and my wealth and all my worldly success. I would make a name for myself, dammit, and in so doing I alone would make my dreams come true.

“HOW’S YOUR PASTRAMI,
Morris?” I asked.

“
Goot,
” he mumbled through a mouth full of meat.

“Not too lean, I hope.”

“No,
goot,
” he said, fighting to swallow so he could snatch another bite.

“You want more coleslaw, maybe?”

With his mouth again full he nodded his head and lifted the top piece of rye bread off his sandwich. I placed a layer of coleslaw over the thickly sliced spiced meat.

“And more Russian dressing?”

He shrugged, but with the top of his sandwich still off I took a knife and slathered the coleslaw with Russian dressing from the little bowl in front of us.

“I hope it’s not too lean,” I said as Morris was in the middle of taking a bite. “I told the lady not too lean.”

Morris nodded at me, his eyes wide in satisfaction, the sandwich still at his mouth.

“Oh, look,” I said. “This is great. Here come our French fries.”

We were in Ben’s Deli, Ben’s Kosher Deli, a block away from Jewelers’ Row in Philadelphia. Ben’s was a long, low restaurant with one aisle down the middle flanked by booths. The walls were painted white and the floor was white linoleum and the leatherette on the booths was dark green and in the back of the store, on two large planks of plywood, like the tablets from Mt. Sinai, was the menu,
writ in dark blue on white. Hot pastrami was a specialty, thick slices of meat with dark peppered crusts and veins of fat that melted on the tongue as you chewed. There was also corned beef, roast beef, tuna fish, chicken salad, egg salad, though no cheese or yogurt or ice cream. Ben’s was a
flayshig
place, which meant that the cholesterol that oozed out on their platters and into your heart came directly from the very muscles of the twice blessed then slaughtered animals as opposed to indirectly, from their milk. Old Hassids sat at the booths yelling at each other in Yiddish, slick young diamond sellers talked out the sides of their mouths as they snapped the complimentary pickles in their teeth, young boys in yarmulkes sat morosely over their egg salad sandwiches and Cokes. Two nuns squinted at the menu on the wall, searching for the toasted cheese sandwiches they had mistakenly stopped in for.

We were in Ben’s because I had a favor to ask Morris and I astutely figured the best time to ask Morris for a favor was when his mouth was full. “Ketchup?” I asked as the waitress spun the plate of thick-cut fries in front of him.

He shook his head no.

“Beer, how about a beer? A beer would go great with this, wouldn’t it?”

Morris, his mouth once again joyously filled with pastrami and coleslaw and rye bread, shook his head vigorously but then stopped all that shaking and shrugged.

“Miss, could we have two beers? Is Heineken all right, Morris?”

He nodded.

“Two Heinekens.”

When the beers came I poured Morris’s into the little water glass she brought with the bottles, making sure the head was a perfect inch thick.

“How’s your lunch, Morris?”

His glass to his lips, he nodded again.

“Take another bite.”

He took another bite.

“I’ve got a favor to ask.”

He fought to finish swallowing what was in his mouth, took a long drink from his beer, and said, “Tell me, Victor, why am I not surprised by this?”

“Because you’re a wise man, Morris.”

“Wise to you, mine
freint,
and your obvious attempt at bribery. But Morris Kapustin is a righteous man, he cannot be bought by a simple pastrami sandwich on rye. I am not so easily taken as you think, Victor. Please pass the coleslaw. Sometimes when I take a bite it slips right out of the sandwich and pffft, onto mine lap. These paper napkins they give you now, such
schlock.
They do nothing to protect you from coleslaw. So tell me what you want from Morris.”

“I need to break into an office.”

He stared at me and shook his head. “I am an investigator, not a thief. You want to find a thief, that’s very simple. Go to a prison, any prison, and you will find many thieves. And the funny thing, even in those prisons there are some thieves who are lawyers, do you understand what I am saying, mine
freint
? But not here will you find a thief, not at this table at Ben’s. Now you’re insulting me now. All of a sudden I don’t want no more your sandwich. Take it away. Take it. It’s like
trayf
to me now.”

He pushed his plate away from him. There was still almost a quarter of a sandwich left. He looked at me. I looked at him. He looked at the plate and then pulled it back.

“Give me the coleslaw, please,” he said. “Just a
pitsel
more is all it is needing.”

I refilled his beer glass.

“Thank you,” he said. “Careful there is not too much head. Who wants to be drinking all that
shum
? It gives gas.”

“I need to break into an office.”

“Again with the office?”

“I have no choice,” I said.

“Okay, Victor. Tell me now what is so important that you have to become a thief and break into some poor
shnook’s
office. Wait, don’t yet tell me.”

He quickly finished his sandwich and downed the entire glass of beer. He snatched a French fry and ate it in two quick bites. Wiping his mouth with a napkin, he said, “Okay, now. I was hurrying up to finish mine eating so that I wouldn’t lose appetite from what you are going to tell me.”

“I need to break into an office.”

“So I have heard three times already. Whose office, if I may ask?”

“William Prescott’s.”

“The other lawyer on that trial you are losing. Oh, don’t protest like that, I know everything. Mine new friend Herm Finklebaum, he has been watching the trial for me, keeping me up to date on exactly how lousy you are doing.”

“I’m in a difficult position,” I said.

“Herm says you are dropping faster than his mother’s
kreplach.
I don’t know his mother, never met the poor woman, but I can imagine.”

“I’m in a very difficult position.”

“And breaking into this fellow’s office, it will help? This I want to hear. This will be better than cable.”

“You get cable, Morris?”

“What, I alone in this country, I don’t deserve to watch our favorite movies on TNT? What crime have I committed, Victor, what? Tell me.”

“I just never thought of you sitting back with a beer watching Sports Center.”

“That Berman fellow, he cracks me up. Jewish actually, you know that? I can tell. Such a
punim.
So tell me why I must to help you commit a felony.”

And so I told him about Concannon and how he wouldn’t let me defend him like he needed to be defended without proof that Jimmy Moore was dumping on him and how I thought that proof was in William Prescott’s office.

“You need proof in black and white to convince this client of yours?” asked Morris incredulously.

“That’s right.”

“And you think that proof is in this office you want to break into?”

“That’s right.”

“Are you sure you won’t find nothing there but
bubkes
?”

“I think it’s there. Prescott is a very scientific trial lawyer. He checks every argument with focus groups before popping it on a jury. He had a jury survey conducted before the trial and I asked him for it five or six times. Each time he said he would send it right over, but I never got it.”

“And you are sure that is your proof?”

“That’s all I can think of.”

“And let me ask you this, mister felony, mister three to five years if you are caught. Even if you find this sheet and use it to convince this client to fight back at this fellow Moore, what then? Is there something you can do to save him?”

“I think there is,” I said, “but I can’t do it without his consent and I can’t get his consent without some proof.”

“It seems to me, Victor, and this is just mine professional opinion so you don’t have to follow it because what do I know, but it seems to me that you are taking a very big risk to help this client.”

“You don’t know the half of it.”

“I know more than I want to know already by a half, believe me. Is this client of yours, is he worth it?”

“Actually, yes,” I said. “He’s a good man who is being
taken advantage of and deserves someone to stand up for him.”

“And that needs to be you?”

“If not me,” I said, “who?”

He paused and ate a French fry and stared at me for a moment. “You’ve been studying Rabbi Hillel maybe?”

I shrugged and nodded with a shy smile, all the while wondering who the heck was Hillel.

“Maybe you have gained a dollop of faith on us after all, Victor. Is it possible?” He ate another French fry and sighed. “So when is it you will be wanting this break-in?” he said finally. “It’s like Watergate, you know, when is it you will be wanting this Watergate break-in to occur?”

“Tonight.”

“Tonight, is that all? It is so good you are leaving yourself so much time to plan. I assume, Victor, knowing you as well as I do, I assume that you have not yet made plans for this Watergate break-in.”

“That’s right.”

“No idea how to do it.”

“That’s right.”

“No keys, no floor plans, nothing,
gornisht.
”

“
Gornisht.
”

“Victor, I am sorry, but I can’t help you with this. I’m an old man, a fat man, ask mine wife and she’ll tell you I drink too much, go ahead, ask Rosalie, she’ll tell you. Bump into her in the street, a stranger, and she will tell you I’m a
shikker.
Mine heart would
plotz
on you, right there in that fellow’s office, and then where would you be? There was a time, Victor, when I was the man for excitement, the man in love with danger, but that time, Victor, that time ended the very day I got cable.”

“I need you, Morris.”

“I’m very sorry, Victor. I can’t.”

“I don’t know what to do.”

“I can’t help you, Victor. But mine son, little Sheldon, have I mentioned mine son the locksmith? I think, though I
am not certain, but I think mine son might be free tonight. He’s very good at these things, mine son. He spent two years in the Israeli army. Two years starving and working off his
tochis,
like a
schmuck,
in love with the idea of the Holy Land before he realized not a
shekel
could he make there. And beside that, for this cloak-and-dagger
mishegahs
he was trained by the best in the world.”

“By the Mossad?”

“Now you’re insulting me again, Victor. By Morris Kapustin, by me. This is not a way to treat someone whose help you so desperately need.”

“I was hoping for you, Morris. You I trust. Little Sheldon I wouldn’t recognize if I bumped into him in the street.”

“And I appreciate that, Victor, but forget about me. You’ll trust me into mine grave if I let you. Mine son, little Sheldon, he’ll set you up fine. You’ll give him a chance, no?”

“I guess I don’t have a choice.”

“Your enthusiasm, Victor, it brings tears. Now of course, for work such as this we have special rates. Hazardous work like this we have very special rates.”

“As I expected,” I said. “I also need you to look into one other thing for me.”

“Does this too need breaking in?”

“No,” I said with a smile. “This is a perfect job for an
alte kocker
like yourself.”

“Such word is the one Yiddish word you learn from me?”

“The night of the arson, a cab driver said he saw a limousine pull out from behind Bissonette’s.”

“Yes? So?”

“I want you to find out who in the area rented a black limousine that night and see if you can link up the rentals to anyone in this case.”

“That I can do.”

“I have a hunch.”

“Victor, please. This whole thing about hunches is very overrated. And who will be paying for all these services?”

“I will.”

“I didn’t know you were such a
macher.
”

“Just do it, Morris.”

“For you, Victor, anything. And I’ll set you up tonight with little Sheldon. Now that all is settled, I have one more question. The strudel at Ben’s, Victor. Have you ever tasted the strudel at Ben’s? Believe me when I tell you this, it is a
mechaieh.
So maybe you’ll be nice
boichick
and be ordering me a piece?”