In This Rain (13 page)

“Now that’s a low blow, unworthy of you.”

“Walter? Are you paying off anyone to get anything done up there? Anyone, anything at all?”

Walter’s eyes sparkled with amusement. “No, Charlie. I am not.”

“Because if you are, you and I are both dead. Dead, Walter. Like Marley’s ghost. Dead, dead, dead.”

“Charlie, you’ve always had a tendency to melodrama. But— ” Walter held up a hand while he sipped his drink, “one thing I certainly don’t want to be is dead. Which is why Three Star is the straight-shootin’est developer you ever saw. From the start, everyone up there has been instructed to conduct their business with city personnel as though the nuns were watching. As I told you they would be.”

“You guarantee that?”

Another sip, and Walter looked Charlie straight in the eye. “As I told you they would be,” he repeated. “I keep my promises, Charlie.”

Charlie nodded and sat back. “Good. Because I’m counting on you.”

“And I on you. Although

”

“Although what?”

“Although if you really loved me, you’d consider seriously the possibility that these aren’t accidents and they’re not my fault. Not Three Star’s fault. That their cause is sabotage.”

“Talk about melodrama, Walter.”

“I know, I know. It sounds that way. But barring any corner-cutting on my part— which you’ve just granted me— three accidents in two weeks does become painfully coincidental.”

“I didn’t agree you hadn’t been cutting corners. I bought your promise you haven’t paid my people to look the other way while you did it.”

“What you’re saying, Charlie, is that you trust me to keep to our arrangement, but not much farther than that.”

“Consider it a tribute to our friendship that I trust you that far.”

“You’re seriously irritated, aren’t you? Beyond what’s required for public consumption?”

“You’re damn right I am. The whole point of Mott Haven was to look good under a microscope. Right now it would look rotten in a fog on a dark night. You need to clean up your act, fast.”

“But if it’s sabotage— ”

“Then hire better security! Get more supervision! Sabotage doesn’t make you innocent, Walter, just cheap.”

“More supervision? Why, Charlie, I thought you were opposed to excessive supervision. Hinders efficiency, creativity, productivity. I’ve heard you give that speech.”

“For God’s sake, Walter! Someone died.”

“And I’m very sorry about that, but I didn’t kill her.”

“Your project did.” Charlie drank the remains of his Scotch. “I’m beginning to wonder if this whole deal was a mistake.”

“Are you?” Walter gave Charlie a speculative look. “Are you really? Well, I assure you it was not.” He put down his glass. “I’m sorry if I appear insensitive. I do understand how serious this is, both for the unfortunate woman’s family, for the project, and politically for you.”

Charlie didn’t point out that wasn’t “both,” it was three. He waved the waiter over, asked Walter, “You want another?”

“Why not?” As the waiter glided away, Walter said, “I’ll tighten up. I’ll have people watching everybody and I’ll have people watching them. But, Charlie, I do wish I could persuade you to explore the sabotage angle.”

Charlie sighed. “We are. Shapiro and Lowry want to, so we are.”

Walter beamed. “Why didn’t you tell me? Instead of letting me hector you?”

“For the same reason I still lift weights.”

“May I ask at whom you’re looking?”

“No.”

“Because Ford Corrington— ”

“Don’t even whisper that, Walter, not even here.”

“Oh, come, Charlie.”

“He’s— ”

“— not the type. Ford Corrington’s a saint, Ford Corrington’s the Great Black Hope. I’ve heard it all. The man hates me.”

“Christ, Walter. He fought you, you lost. Get over it.”

“I don’t enjoy losing.”

“Does anyone? But every time you sneeze you accuse Corrington of giving you pneumonia. You got your damn memorial built, what are you still sore about?”

“In Riverside Park! I made a legitimate, generous offer to honor the sacrifices made by the uptown communities on that horrendous day, and Corrington— ”

“— didn’t see it that way.”

“He accused me of colonizing! In the press!”

“And personally I thought a lawsuit was an overreaction,” Charlie said.

“Yes, you mentioned that at the time. I did rather hope to enjoy your support, as one comes to expect of a friend. However, I understood when the exigencies of political life intervened.”

“No, I just thought you were wrong.”

“Then you must have been overjoyed when my lawsuit was dismissed.”

“I didn’t care enough to be overjoyed. But I got a kick out of the grounds.”

“It was not a ‘vague allegorical reference’! It was a deliberate slur, damaging to my good name— ”

“Walter, drop it. You told it to the judge already, and you lost.”

“Yes, well, I’d like to see what a white judge would have said.”

“To Corrington that whole thing was just a way to get his name in the papers, fighting the good fight. It wasn’t personal. You made it personal with the lawsuit.”

“What choice did I have?” Walter protested. “Corrington would ban white people north of Ninety-sixth Street.”

“That’s crap and you know it.”

“Charlie, please calm down, I’m speaking metaphorically. And you know it.”

“Let me suggest you lower the level of anti-Corrington rhetoric over these next few months.”

“Damn it, Charlie, this is a man who gives press conferences and won’t talk to white reporters.”

“To help black reporters get their faces on TV. And what do you care? You’re not a reporter.”

Walter’s pale blue gaze held Charlie. Charlie returned it steadily. “Whatever my reasoning, and whatever its merit,” Walter said, “I think we can agree that Ford Corrington hates me. I really think it would be a good idea to have a look in that direction.”

“How would I justify that, Walter? A pillar of the Harlem community suspected of sabotaging your job up in the Bronx? Why?”

“To stop me successfully completing— ”

“— a deal he doesn’t know you and I have.”

Walter shrugged. “Maybe he does.”

“How would he?”

“I don’t know. But— ”

“Trust me, he doesn’t. If he did he’d have gone running to the press the moment he found out. Which you can count on him doing if we start investigating him. It’s a good thing this is just a paranoid fantasy.”

The waiter returned, setting down fresh drinks and removing their drained glasses.

“And,” said Charlie, tasting his Scotch.

“There’s more, beyond ‘paranoid’?”

“If it were sabotage, it’s much more likely to be someone who works for you and feels like he got screwed over at some point, than Corrington. An inside job, so it would come back to you again. Sabotage, incompetence, graft, whatever. It keeps coming straight back to Three Star, Walter. To you.”

Walter sighed. “In other words, I can expect you and the luscious Louise to send your regrets and not attend my Fourth of July festivities after all?”

“Looks that way.”

“Alas. Well, in that case, my friend, bottoms up.”

Walter smiled. Charlie didn’t, but kept his eyes locked on Walter’s while they lifted their glasses to each other and drank.

Heart’s Content

A week after he walked through the last gate, as soon as he’d found a job and a room and so could convince his parole officer that he was likely to come back, Joe turned in a detailed description of his proposed trip out of state (what the long-timer two cells over used to call “filing a flight plan”) and headed the rattling truck south down the Thruway. Though if he had told no one and filed nothing, just gassed up the truck and, after his visit, kept going, how long would it take them to notice, he wondered, and how much would anyone care? But while he had no reason to return, other than the state’s insistence— he had not yet found the cabin and the derelict acre behind it— he also had no reason to go any other place.

Following Ellie’s precise directions, he’d arrived at the new condo in Teaneck with chocolates and flowers for her and gummy bears and a large wooden-boxed watercolor set to give to Janet. Things were wrong from the moment he walked in the door.

Janet wore a yellow party dress and a band in her hair. “She wanted to dress up for you,” Ellie explained. Joe smiled, but remembered: when his daughter was younger, when he was home, Janet had hated dressing up; dresses got in the way of roller-skating and mudpie making. Ellie took the flowers, kissed his cheek quickly, stepped away. Ellie’s lips smiled but her eyes didn’t, and Janet didn’t smile at all.

“Hi,” he said to Janet, squatting down as he used to so he could look her in the eye. She was taller now, his position awkward. Janet gave her mother a swift, confused glance. Ellie said nothing.

“Hi,” Janet finally said, polite child civilly greeting a stranger.

Joe held out the candy in one hand and the gift-wrapped paints in the other. Janet looked to her mother again: Is it okay, can I take them? Ellie nodded and now Janet smiled. “Thank you,” she said. She flicked a glance at the gummy bears, then put them on the coffee table: the gift-wrapped box was more interesting. She untied the ribbon patiently but, when the tape proved recalcitrant, flashed Joe the cockeyed, conspiratorial grin he remembered— she looked like his daughter then— and ripped the paper off.

She was a well-mannered child. When she’d opened the box, examined the contents, and shut it once more, she thanked him again, and smiled. Not, this time, the crooked grin, but a smile startlingly like one he used to get from Ellie, a smile that charitably forgave him for things he never knew he’d done.

“You like to draw,” Joe said, still smiling himself, still trying. “And paint.”

Janet shrugged and looked at Ellie again, and Ellie said, “Come on, let’s have cookies.” They sat at the table in the breakfast nook. Beyond the picture window late-season ice floated at the center of a cattail-bordered pond. Joe had noticed as he parked that unlike many in the complex, Ellie’s condo had no flower beds, no trees or shrubs: no landscaping but the lawn.

“Janet sings,” Ellie told him, pouring coffee. “In the chorus at school. She’s gotten very interested in music. Isn’t that right, honey?”

Janet shrugged, embarrassed. Joe recalled, now, reading about a music teacher, lessons, a chorus, in a penciled, misspelled letter; and she was learning to play the piano, too, was he remembering that right? But he’d read that in prison, in a metal cell. In his mind, everything from those years lay at the bottom of a steep-sided, shadowed ravine. He had hoped to build a bridge from one cliff’s-edge to the other, to step from the terrain of his old life to the new as though he never had set foot in that dark valley; and so everything he acquired during that changeless stay he’d tried to leave behind. But now he sat over coffee in Ellie’s bright, new kitchen. The sweet sounds of children’s voices rose and fell from the tape Janet put on for him of last year’s chorus performance. He stared at a refrigerator whose magnets held photos and a list and a calendar and not a single crayon sketch or Magic Marker drawing. He saw his foundationless bridge crumbling, teetering, crashing through tree branches to the valley floor, and he understood he’d been a fool again.

Heart’s Content

It was full dark when Joe came in from the garden.

The planting beds were free of rose-of-Sharon runners. He’d pruned the buddleia, the deep purple one that would make small fragrant blooms and the white one whose blooms would be much larger and more showy, striking against their dark foliage though the bees and hummingbirds would like them less. He’d weeded and watered and staked and now he could no longer see and finally he had to give it up.

Inside, he washed up. He opened a can of soup and made a sandwich, Swiss on rye. He brought his dinner to the chair by the window. On moonlit nights the garden, viewed from here, appeared sharp and fresh, a crisp black-and-white snapshot of itself; but tonight low clouds blocked the moon, and the garden’s forms, framed in the squares of the window, looked soft edged, drained of color. He knew every inch of this ground but still tonight’s murky shadows seemed to hide secrets. Until, finally, he switched on the light, and all he saw in the glass was himself.

He ate slowly, did his dishes, made new coffee. A fresh pot, coffee just brewing: to him, the smell of beginning, like the feel of a clean shirt, like a song’s opening notes. That last moment before you knew the promise would not come true. That the cloth and the music and the scent (that the man wearing and hearing and breathing in) were not, not quite, good enough.

He poured the coffee and he drank. It was disappointing as it always was and he savored it, loved it. As he always did.

When the coffee was gone he turned on the lamp above the table. A warm yellow light, comforting to read by. Not good for the forensic deconstruction of photographs, but it was what he had.

It took over two hours.

As always, he absorbed the photos first, seeing not the pictures but the patterns. Contours, swirls and shapes, sharp lines and small specks: abstracted of meaning, surface only. It always worked like that for him.

Next, the reports. Trying in his mind to invent images, illustrating the words as though narrative were all he had. What should it look like, the thing described?

Finally, the photos again, this time as pictures, compared to the words and their imaginary illustrations. But always also as patterns. Like the garden: at some times mass, form, blocks of color; at others, individual stems reaching or leaning, particular blooms swelling or fading; always, both.

He opened a beer and he drank it slowly down. He called Ann.

“I found it.”

Sutton Place

An animated crowd at the bar, a Latin beat to the music. A laughing, catching-up, everyone-at-once conversation among four law school friends while they waited for another. A glance at a wristwatch, raised eyebrows.

“Anyone hear from Jen?”

“It’s only half an hour. For Jen, that’s on time.”