Hostile Witness (6 page)

“You mean stop me from lying,” he said, obviously amused.

“I know you might want to confess, the urge is understandable,” I said. “And whatever you say remains with me, but you have to be aware that any such confession could have consequences as to our defense.”

There was more to it than that, of course. I could have gone on speaking for a good ten minutes, but after talking about his undoubted need to confess and seeing him sitting there, calm, composed, his face lacking the slightest indicia of an urgency to tell me anything, I stopped.

“I guess you’ve heard all this before,” I said.

“I guess,” he replied.

“Good,” I said, though I started to sweat a little. There was something about his composure that was unnerving. “Now just a few questions. Have you ever been arrested before?”

“Yes,” he said without a wince. “Before I met Jimmy I was involved with drugs and drug sellers. I was arrested often.”

“Were you convicted of anything?”

“Once of possession with intent to distribute a banned substance, to wit, cocaine, and twice of forgery. I supported my habit by check,” he said with a smile. “Except the checks weren’t always mine. None of this is a secret. I’m one of Jimmy’s success stories, one of his saved souls.
He likes to be able to point at us to show what is possible with drug rehabilitation.”

“Still, you probably won’t be testifying,” I said. “Forgery is just the kind of prior conviction that a prosecutor would use to show your lack of honesty or trustworthiness.”

“That’s what Mr. McCrae said too.”

“Did you know Zack Bissonette?”

“Sure,” he said. “Nice guy, lousy ballplayer.”

“Assuming you didn’t do it, any idea who would have beaten that nice guy into a coma?”

“I heard it was the mob.”

“Is that what you heard?”

“That’s what I heard.”

“Is that what he’s going to say when he wakes up?”

“What I also heard, Victor,” he said, his hands laying still, one atop the other on his lap, “is that he’s on the edge of never waking up.”

“And then you’d only be up for murder.”

There was a crack in the calm facade at that moment, a lowering of the guard, and what I saw was not the confident insider but a child, scared and lonely, the kid at the edge of the playground, the kid never passed to in the basketball games, who only received two valentines while his classmates took home sacks full. The peek inside didn’t last long, quick as a politician’s lie the facade was back, but I had a glimpse of what he was feeling and how much he was hiding and it all touched me in a strangely personal way. And suddenly my playacting the role of a hard-boiled criminal defense attorney didn’t seem quite so clever.

“Are you sure you don’t want someone more experienced?” I asked.

“You’ll do fine,” he said. “Jimmy said you’ll do fine.”

I thought about it for a moment. “If we both agree that I will represent you,” I said, “we also are going to have to agree on a strategy. What line of defense was Mr. McCrae going to follow?”

“He was going to follow Prescott completely,” he said.

I tried to smile reassuringly. “From what I’ve seen, that looks like your best bet,” I said. “But that decision is up to you.”

“I know,” he said. “And that’s the way Jimmy still wants it to go.”

“You know, Chester,” I said, speaking very slowly, very carefully, wanting to phrase what I was required to say just right. “With co-defendants there is always a potential conflict between defenses. One defendant could always point the finger at the other and say I didn’t do it, he did it.”

“There is no conflict here,” he said quickly, without hesitation.

“Do you trust the councilman with your life?”

“Absolutely.”

“Rushing to trial like we are, I might not be able to help you if things go wrong.”

“I appreciate you wanting to be in a position to help me, Victor,” he said, without putting even a touch of patronization in his voice, which was pretty impressive. “I really do. But there’s always been someone reaching out to help me, someone with a clipboard from the city or the state or the federal government, and all they’ve ever done is dig my hole a little deeper. Only one man ever reached out a hand and really, truly helped.”

“And who was that?”

“Jimmy Moore,” he said. “Jimmy’s been called a lot of things by a lot of people and he’s everything they say. But he’s been the best friend I ever had. He told me to hire you, so you’re hired. He told me to follow Mr. Prescott’s lead, so that’s what we’re going to do.”

“Then your explicit instructions are not to interfere with Prescott.”

“Exactly.”

I looked at him carefully. He was a smart man, I could see that, and he trusted Jimmy Moore completely. Who
was I to get in the way? This had been easier than ever I had thought. I slapped my knee and stood up. “Good,” I said. “Then that’s settled.”

“So you’ll represent me?” he asked.

“If you want me to, I will.”

“I do,” he said.

“I don’t have the connections old Pete McCrae had.”

“You’ll do fine,” he said. “Don’t worry, Victor. You’ll make out just fine.”

And that’s how we left it, Chet Concannon patting my arm to help brace my courage as I faced the coming ordeal, as if I were the defendant and he were the lawyer, instead of the other way around. He opened the door and gestured for me to precede him out of the office. I had just stepped through the opening when I heard a loud voice rasp through the hushed Talbott, Kittredge hallways.

“Hell, I’m hungry. Hungry.” It was a sharp, emphatic voice, the voice of an overzealous lieutenant colonel or a college basketball coach. “I’m too hungry to work just yet. We have all night.” It was a voice of authority, an exuberant, demanding voice. “Let’s get out of this dump and find something to eat.”

I recognized the voice right off. I had been listening to it all day. It was the voice of Jimmy Moore.

“LET ME TELL YOU SOMETHING,”
said Jimmy Moore in his insistent voice, poking his cigarette right at me. “Those fat goons in the mayor’s office have no idea what is happening. No idea. They can’t understand it. They see the numbers, same as I do. If the primary was right now, even with the indictment, I’d beat that bastard by a hundred thousand votes, easy. Easy. And he knows it, he knows it, but he doesn’t know why. He doesn’t know my secret. He doesn’t know where my power lies. But I’ll tell you where.”

He took a drag from his cigarette, held between the tips of his thumb and first three fingers.

“It’s in my passion,” he said with a violent expulsion of smoke. “Just like Samson’s strength was in his hair. If ever I lose the passion, well then stick a fork in me, I’m done. I might as well retire to Palm Springs and play golf every day. Too bad for the mayor I never cared for the game, right, Chet?”

“That’s right, Councilman,” said Chester Concannon.

We were at DiLullo Centro, a shining, famous bistro across the street from the Academy of Music, where a stylish crowd greeted each other warmly as they hopped from table to table. Everyone seemed to know at least someone there, and the one who everyone seemed to know was Jimmy Moore.

Moore was a thick-shouldered man of about fifty, short gray hair cut like Caesar’s, clean-shaven, with a round,
angry face. He wore a flash Italian suit, designed for men thinner and taller. It was too tight on him and, in it, he looked nothing like the draped, statuesque mannequins in magazine ads. He had transformed it from a suit of elegance to a suit of armor. Embroidered on the white cuff of his shirt were the initials JDM. He had the intense eyes of an athlete and sucked attention to himself as he spoke, grabbed it with those eyes and the vicious certainty in his voice. He moved quickly, aggressively, head turning in sudden jerks like a giant bird. When he looked at me, it was as though he was looking into me and there was a sudden and intense connection. For that instant there was no one else in the room but him and me. And then he looked away, at someone else, and the connection was broken. But, even so, his animalistic power lingered like an afterimage burned onto the cornea, leaving no doubt that here was a dangerous man.

There were seven of us at a large, round table in DiLullo’s, having just finished a lavish meal. Next to Jimmy sat his wife, Leslie, grasping tightly to the stem of her champagne glass, the puffed shoulders of her bright red dress shining like huge apples. She was still a pretty woman, auburn hair done up in all kinds of wing things, smooth shiny skin tight over sharp cheekbones, a dramatic neck, but the years with Jimmy Moore’s passion had clearly not been easy ones and her face showed the wear. Next to Leslie Moore was her sister, Renee, a heavier, more bitter version of Mrs. Moore, whose mission in life, it appeared, was to keep Leslie’s champagne glass filled. Then sat Chuckie Lamb, Concannon, myself, and Prescott, who had encouraged me to have the champagne but had taken none for himself. Jimmy Moore was holding court here, his voice loud and rich, his strong large hand warmly shaking those of his admirers as they came to the table paying respect.

“The mayor thinks he can destroy my reputation with
this indictment, but he’s dreaming. Dreaming. His stooges in the so-called Department of Justice can try to sully my name, they can drag me through their mud, hell let them. Let them. I got enough to kick their butts halfway to Jersey and still become mayor. They all think I’m doing this with mirrors, my numbers rising like a rocket ship, my fund-raising shooting through the roof. Over two million in the last year for CUP, my group, not to mention the fat stream of donations I have going for my youth treatment centers. And let me tell you something, I got some big guns giving, sure, but I get more ten dollar donations, twenty dollars, fifty dollars, more than anybody. Nobody understands it. Nobody. I was just a normal political hack like every other slob in City Hall when Nadine died, just another grubby councilman looking for his piece of the pie. But when she died, when they killed her with their poisons, murdered her, fuck. Fuck.”

He slammed his cigarette into an ashtray and lit another with his gold lighter. Leslie Moore drained her glass of champagne and reached for the bottle herself. There was a long silence. The Moores’ daughter, Nadine, had died of an overdose of barbiturates, it was in all the papers five or six years back, a teenager still when she started playing around with a dangerous crowd, experimenting with whatever was available. And then one night at a party, after too much cocaine and too many of the wrong pills, she collapsed and died. Moore was on the evening news, crying first and then shouting about vengeance, railing at the drug dealers who were destroying the city’s youth. A few weeks later he started his campaign to wipe them out, neighborhood by neighborhood, crack house by crack house. There were marches, there were raids, there were mysterious fires and unexplained deaths. He had started a war.

After a drag from his cigarette, Moore continued. “I’ve been building my new coalition day by day. I speak in the
neighborhoods, I do the good work, I open the athletic centers, the shelters, my youth treatment centers, but it’s not the speeches, it’s not the buildings, it’s not the programs that draw my support. These people, they look into my eyes and you know what they see?”

“Their taxes being raised,” said Prescott.

Jimmy Moore laughed, a genuine, head thrown back laugh. “My lawyer the Republican wouldn’t vote for me on a bet, I know that.”

“I can’t vote for you,” Prescott said. “I live in Merion.”

“Of course you do. But I didn’t hire you for your vote. I hired you because you’re going to kick the government’s ass.”

“We’ll do what we can.”

“No, you’ll do what you have to. But let me tell you, Bill. What the people see in my eyes is real. It can’t be faked. You won’t find a white politician in the entire country with the following I have in the black community and that’s because they know the pain I’ve felt, they know the hate I feel, they know I will rid them of their greatest threat or die trying. What they see is my passion.”

He leaned over and draped one of his thick, tightly clothed arms over his wife’s shoulders.

“It’s no different than what I felt when I first saw Leslie, standing in that crowd outside the schoolyard, with her little Catholic school skirt and her saddle shoes. She was so shy, she was, hiding out at the back of the group, unable to meet my stare from the other side of the fence. I was in my football uniform when I first saw her, on the practice field, and my passion spoke and I knew. I wouldn’t let anything get in the way. Not her mother, not her little private school boyfriend with the fancy sweaters. Nothing.”

“And nothing did,” said Leslie Moore without even the hint of a smile.

“That’s right,” said Moore. “Remember the flowers and jewelry and poems, those marvelous rich poems?”

“Cribbed,” said Mrs. Moore’s sister, Renee. “You couldn’t even write your own love poems to Leslie.”

“I was not as sharp with words in my youth as I have since become,” said Jimmy. “And John Donne expressed what I was feeling far better than I could have then.” He gazed into his wife’s eyes and recited, “‘Twice or thrice I have loved thee, before I knew thy face or name.’”

Mrs. Moore took another drink from her glass.

“What happened to the boy with the sweaters?” I asked. Chuckie Lamb, who was in the middle of a champagne gulp, coughed the bubbles loudly out his nose and fumbled for a napkin.

“Richard Simpson,” said Mrs. Moore. “Sweet Richard Simpson. He was such a nice boy. Refined.”

“He stopped coming around after we started together,” said Moore, turning to greet a stooped, grayed man who passed by our table. “Judge,” he said loudly to the man.

“You broke his jaw,” said Renee.

“Judge Westcock,” said Moore, reaching out to shake the old man’s hand. “You’re looking better than ever, you fox.” The judge’s palm pressed into the back of a pretty young woman as he spoke warmly with Moore, the conversation at our table stopping cold until Moore was free again to lead it. Every few minutes someone of import stopped by to shake the councilman’s hand and whisper in his ear, and during these interludes we waited until Moore could once again turn his attention back to the table. I knew the names of many of the people who came, basketball players and politicians and local names from every stratum. It was as if this table at DiLullo’s was the councilman’s after-hours office, where he could always be reached and deals always be cut.

“Funny,” said Chuckie after the judge left. “That didn’t look like Mrs. Westcock.”

“She’s about fifty pounds lighter and fifty years younger than Mrs. Westcock,” said Jimmy Moore, laughing.

“I’m tired,” said Mrs. Moore.

Moore lifted the champagne bottle out of its silver bucket and poured what was left into Mrs. Moore’s glass. “That will perk you up, it always does. Chuckie, get another bottle.”

Chuckie Lamb pressed his lips together and said, “Yes, Councilman,” before ducking away from the table to find a waiter. This would be our fourth bottle, and though the plan had been to grab a quick dinner before heading back to join the Talbott, Kittredge team at work, the champagne had successfully numbed our desire to deal with the piles of paper waiting for us at Prescott’s office.

“What kind of name is Carl?” asked Moore, turning his attention at me.

“My family is Jewish,” I said.

“So you’re a Jew,” he said in a voice so loud I shrunk from it. He might as well have been a druggist asking for the whole store to hear whether I wanted ribbed or lubricated.

“I’m sort of nothing, but my family is Jewish.”

“It’s good we have some diversity now. Prescott’s a fine lawyer but WASPs have such thin blood. It’s that northern heritage, all those millennia shivering atop Scandinavian glaciers. There’s no passion bubbling through his veins, just cool calculation. But the Jews are a Semitic people, your blood was thickened in the heat of the Egyptian desert and the centuries settling beside the Mediterranean.”

“My grandfather came over from Russia,” I said.

“You’ll provide the passion in our defense,” said Moore.

Chuckie Lamb slipped back into his seat and said, “Just don’t spill all that passion until after the trial.”

“Victor will do just fine,” said Chet Concannon.

“No doubt,” said Prescott.

“I’m tired,” said Mrs. Moore, draining what was left of her champagne. “Renee and I would like to go home.”

“Why are we leaving so soon?” asked Renee.

The waiter just then brought another bottle of champagne and loosed the cork at the table. It shot into the napkin he held with a festive smack and bright white lather streamed down the bottle’s sides.

“The car will take you home,” said Moore. Concannon stood as the women readied to leave. Prescott and I joined him.

The waiter had poured a small amount of the champagne into Moore’s glass and was waiting for a sign to pour it generally. Renee grabbed the bottle from his hand and poured it into her glass, taking a quick gulp.

“It was a pleasure meeting you, Victor,” said Leslie Moore.

“Thank you, Mrs. Moore,” I said. “But the pleasure was mine.”

“I’ll walk you out,” said Moore.

“No need,” said Leslie.

“I insist,” said Jimmy.

“Something’s wrong with that bottle,” said Renee, pouring another glass for herself.

“Let me see that,” said Jimmy. He pulled the bottle from her hand and examined the label. “Who bought this crap?”

“It was our fourth bottle,” said Chuckie. “I thought…”

“Don’t think too much, okay, Chuckie? That’s not why I pay you. You think too much, you’ll end up back in that shithole I dug you out of. I don’t care how much it costs, always get the best. I’ve told you that before.”

“But I just…”

“Shut up. I don’t want to hear it. You buy another crappy bottle of champagne and I’ll can your butt, understand?”

“I understand,” said Chuckie.

“Now give this California piss to some homeless voter and buy us another bottle of the real thing.”

“Yes, Councilman,” said Chuckie, his head down and his barking voice now pale and small.

As Jimmy and his wife walked to the restaurant’s exit, Renee took another quick swallow before following the others.

“I guess Jimmy prefers the imports,” said Prescott.

“The councilman can’t tell the difference after one bottle,” said Concannon, “but Renee’s got a taste for the best the councilman can buy. Sit down, Charles. I’ll take care of it.” He called a waiter over. “Dom Perignon, seventy-eight. And take this bottle away, please.”

The waiter bent a little lower and put on an expression. “Is something unsatisfactory, sir?” he said.

“You mean other than your breath?” said Chuckie, slumped in his seat.

“The wine was a bit too insouciant,” said Concannon calmly. “The sommelier knows our tastes. Tell him we were disappointed.”

“Of course, sir,” said the waiter, whisking the offending bottle from the table.

Concannon mussed Chuckie’s hair. “It’s just the trial,” he said. “Jimmy’s on edge.”

“Too bad it’s not a knife’s edge,” said Chuckie.

“Leslie looked good tonight,” said Prescott, changing the subject.

“Therapy four times a week,” said Concannon.

“She seemed almost cheery.”

“For the amount of money that doctor costs,” said Chuckie Lamb, “she should be damn joyful. She should be a fucking Santa Claus.”

“Well, it’s working, then,” said Prescott.

“I don’t know about you,” I said, “but that is as sad a woman as I have ever seen.”

“And still,” said Prescott, “the improvement is startling.”

He pushed his length out of his chair. “I see Senator
Specter over there. Chester, why don’t we give our regards before I head home. When Jimmy comes back,” he commanded me, “tell him I’ll talk to him in the morning.” Off he strode with Concannon to the other end of the dining room.

“Mrs. Moore is upset about the indictment, I guess,” I said to Chuckie.

“Shit. Look at the bar,” he said. “As soon as the councilman finishes escorting his wife out of the restaurant the councilman’s girlfriend will step away from it and join us.”