Hostile Witness (52 page)

It felt good, too, until he shot me.

THE GOOD NEWS,
I suppose, is that it didn’t kill me.

The bad news is that it really hurt a lot.

The bullet went into my chest just below my right shoulder and smashed through a few underdeveloped muscles, including the pectoralis minor, the name of which I considered an insult and tried to convince the doctor to change to something like pectoralis mucho grande, though she didn’t seem amused. After it ripped through my pectoralis mucho grande the bullet hit a rib, bounced around a bit, and clipped off a piece of my right lung. That would explain the sucking sound I heard as I slid down the wall of the vestibule; it was air seeping out of my lung, causing a condition called pneumothorax. What happened then is that my lung filled with blood. That was like drowning in ten feet of water without needing goggles to see the world slipping away.

Winston Osbourne could have finished me off right there. I was not one of those heroes who, with a chest full of lead, was ready to fight his way out of a jam. One little .38 slug and I was slumped on the floor of the vestibule in shock, bleeding, breathing the sharp smell of saltpeter into my remaining operative lung, waiting to be finished off. But for some reason, maybe the tremendous report of the shot ringing in that tiny vestibule or the sight of me sliding down the wall with
a bullet in my chest or the blood and urine pooling around me, I never knew, but for some reason after that first shot he ran.

I was found by one of the older divorced women who lived in my building, coming down the stairs, cocked forward at the waist with caution, a broom in her hand held like a baseball bat, investigating the gunshot. It was nice of her to call the ambulance and save my life, but I would have preferred if she hadn’t screamed so loudly when she discovered me lying there. I jerked involuntarily at the sound and that hurt as much as the gunshot itself.

Have I mentioned that I don’t do well with pain?

The pathetic history of my life didn’t pass before my eyes as I lay in that vestibule. That treat waited until I was in Graduate Hospital, out of intensive care, ready to receive a seemingly endless stream of visitors. The shooting was in the paper, front page of the
Daily News,
“
CONCANNON LAWYER BLASTED AGAIN,
” and so they came, one after the other, old friends from high school, old lovers, my ex-fiancée Julie, who is now unhappily married to a proctologist, yes there is a God, lawyers with whom I had tangled in court, law school classmates who had achieved a success I couldn’t match, Rita, Vimhoff, Ellie, Guthrie that bastard, Lauren, Dominic and Jasper and Virgil, trundling in loudly together like the Three Stooges, Saltz, Lefkowitz, Judge Gimbel, Slocum, even the mayor, with television cameras in tow.

Beth came every day after work and sat by my bed during visiting hours. She was there when my test results for HIV came back negative and we each raised a urine-colored apple juice in gratitude to whatever angel had been looking out for me. We talked about the
Saltz
case, and how much money we’d earn, and then we talked about how, after my debacle in the
Concannon
case, I’d never get another client. I had a rich dim future ahead of me, which, as I lay in that bed, fighting off an infection in my chest, pus draining like curdled milk from a tube running out of my side, didn’t seem so bad. She visited as regularly as a relative, Beth did, which was nice of her since my mother decided not to come in from Arizona, seeing that I survived and all, though she assured me in the letter that she would have dropped everything for my funeral. My father visited only now and then to grumble.

“What’s that you got there?” he said, pointing to a large book that lay on my bed table.

“A get-well gift from a friend,” I said. “Someone who knew Grandpop. It’s the first book of the Talmud.”

“Who the hell would give you something like that?”

“He’s a private investigator. He thought it would be good for me. The start of my education. I might like it, who knows? It’s mostly translated into English, though there’s still some Hebrew, and your favorite language, Aramaic.”

“My father wasted his time on that crap.”

“Really?”

“I remember he read it every Saturday and then, when he was already in his sixties, he finished the last book and threw a party. A lot of smelly old men smoking cigars and farting.”

“What did he do on Saturdays after he finished?”

“He started over again, volume one, from the very first words.”

So that’s what I did in the hospital, I read Morris’s Talmud, starting, like my grandfather, at volume one. There was a section in Hebrew in the middle and then a translation with commentaries surrounding it, all in English except for those from some guy Rashi, who wrote in his own alphabet that they didn’t bother to translate. It was all about property and contracts and torts, like the first year of law school, except it was different in a strange
soulful way. The first section was about a piece of cloth claimed by two men. Cut it in half, the book said. Sounded right to me.

In my first week back at Derringer and Carl I had a visitor, a Michael Tombelli from down on Two Street in South Philly. He was a dark young man with a scary smile and thick belly. He sat down across from me with a sneer, leaned back, and put his feet on my desk.

“I got a little problem, Vic.”

“Call me Mr. Carl, Michael,” I said. “And take your feet off my desk.”

“Sure thing,” he said with his smile as his feet dropped loudly. “A couple days ago I get stopped by the cops on Oregon Avenue.”

“Were you speeding?”

“Sort of.”

“Pay the fine,” I advised.

“Yeah, right, well, I would, sure, but then they tell me the car is stolen.”

“Imagine that.”

“You borrow a car from a friend and look what happens.”

“So you’re up for grand theft auto, is that the story?”

“And they find a gun in the trunk.”

“A pistol?”

“A Chinese MAK-90 assault rifle modified for fully automatic performance.”

“You’re a deer hunter, I suppose?”

“You’d be surprised how fast those suckers can run.”

“And still, with all these problems, you are walking around, eating cheese steaks, grabbing a beer at the corner tavern?”

“The prison cap.”

“Such a wonderful thing for nice young men like yourself.
You’re right, Michael, you do have a problem. So what are you doing here?”

“I need a lawyer.”

“Yes, you do, Michael. But I haven’t been so successful on the criminal side. I’m sticking to civil law from now on.”

“What, you’re not going to take my case?”

“That’s right. Now, after you get out of jail, if you want to sue the friend who lent you the stolen car with the automatic rifle inside, give me a call and I’ll see what I can do.”

“But I was sent.”

“You were sent?”

“Yeah. I was sent. The man told me to come here and that you should become my lawyer.”

“The man sent you. What man?”

“The big guy.”

“I’m supposed to guess, is that it, Michael? This man who sent you, he was big as in tall or as in fat?”

“Now I know you’re putting me on. Mr. Raffaello sent me, said you would take care of me, said you owed him a favor.”

“Oh,” I said slowly. “That man.”

“He told me to give you this.” He reached into his brown leather bomber jacket and pulled out a stack of bills, green and dirty, bound with a rubber band. He tossed the stack onto my desk. I didn’t reach for it.

“What’s that, Michael?”

“Ten thou. He told me to give it to you, like an up-front fee.”

“My retainer?”

“Yeah. That’s it. Your retainer.”

I knew it would come, I just didn’t know when or what. I thought maybe I’d get a call in the middle of the night, a soft voice telling me to show up at some deserted corner in South Philly for my instructions. I had already decided I
wouldn’t kill anybody for him, but I had also decided that I would do anything short of that. The surreptitious delivery, the stashing of stolen goods, the hiding of a fugitive until the heat died down. I owed Enrico Raffaello, yes I did, and even though it hadn’t turned out well for me it was a debt I would have to repay. I was almost disappointed that repaying my debt would be so pedestrian—represent Michael Tombelli and I was off the hook.

“Hey,” said Michael. “You’re the guy shot by the wacko they stuck in that loony bin up there in Haverford.”

“That’s right,” I said.

He leaned forward. “What did it feel like, getting shot and all?”

“I figure you’ll find out for yourself someday, Michael.”

“Not me. I’m too smart for any of that. But my buddy Peter Cressi, he plays it so far to the edge you never know. You know Peter?”

“I haven’t had the pleasure.”

“He’s coming in too, today or tomorrow. Nothing serious, just a DUI. But he’ll be back. He’s the guy what they should put up in the loony bin.”

“Tell me something, Michael,” I said. “Am I on a list of some sort now? Are your friends going to keep coming in to see me?”

“You bet, Mr. Carl. The word’s out that you’re the guy when we have our little problems.” His smile again. “You’re going to be busier’n shit.”

“Now I understand,” I said, and I did. No more worrying about my future, it was set in Carrara marble. “All right. Michael, here’s the word, and you should tell it to your friend Peter and anyone else who is going to come visiting. The law says I can’t accept any money that is the fruit of an illegal transaction, so any money you give me has to be clean. You understand what I just said?”

He scrunched up his eyes and rubbed the back of his hand across his nose and then said, “Sure, yeah.”

“Is this money from a drug transaction?” I asked.

“Hey, wait, what do you take me for?”

“Is this money stolen?”

“Get out of here. Rest assured, Mr. Carl, I work hard for my money.”

“Knowing the law as well as you do, can I, in good conscience, take this money, Michael?”

“Trust me, Mr. Carl,” he said with his broad smile.

I looked at him very carefully, weighed everything, and then I took hold of the bundle of bills and placed it in my desk drawer. “Wait just a second,” I said as I reached into my drawer for some letterhead, “while I write up a receipt.”

“Receipt?” he said, as if he had never heard of the word before. “What’s with the receipt? I paid you cash.”

“Lawyers who don’t give receipts for cash sometimes have the peculiar problem of forgetting to report the payments to the IRS.”

“Yeah, isn’t that funny,” said Michael Tombelli. “That’s what happened to my last lawyer. He just got four years.”

“First I’ll write out your receipt, Michael,” I said, “and then we’ll discuss what to tell the District Attorney.”

So that was that. I had once aspired to walk among the paneled corridors of wealth and power with the elite names of the legal world. I had wanted to shed my past and my heritage as a snake sheds its skin and ascend to Olympian heights. Now I would skulk around the City Hall courtrooms, representing baby mobsters and other lowlifes as they tried to minimize their jail time for their petty and not-so-petty crimes, socking away my retainers and advising my dear clients how to stay just to the right side of that narrow and shifting line. I knew what life was like for a lawyer who represented the members of the mob. It was no different than for a lawyer like Tony Baloney, who spent his life defending drug dealing scum. He was scorned by
his fellow practitioners, excluded from the finer firms, from the prestigious clubs, from the sober-minded committees of the bar association. Aspersions were cast as to his integrity, his veracity, his fitness to stand before the bar. He was investigated relentlessly by the District Attorney, he was hunted like wild game by federal authorities, his taxes were audited each and every year. He became a pariah.

I had found my calling.