Nothing Lost (7 page)

Poppy came to the bathroom door, a face towel in her hand. “It's a contributor.”

“Believes in what you stand for?”

She disappeared back into the bathroom. “Get some sleep, J.J.” Then she was in the doorway again. She had an acutely sensitive early warning system. J.J. normally evinced no interest in her public life. Which meant he had something on his mind. Something that would affect her. Of that she was sure. “What's your sudden interest in the Loomis Cattle Company?”

“One Lewis Colin. Formerly Colinsky. Born in the San Fernando Valley. That's in California someplace.”

“Los Angeles.”

He knew where the San Fernando Valley was. He just wanted to keep Poppy's attention. When she was off balance, not in total command, she was desirable. Private time was her way of staying in charge. Controlling, not cuntable.

He detected the slightest quiver of urgency. “Get to the point, J.J.”

“Lewis Colin. Owns the Loomis Cattle Company.”

“So.”

“In the world of adult cinema, Lewis Colin is known as . . .” He made her wait. “Cowboy Collins.”

“Shit.”

“The Trail Rider himself. The Cowboy and his trusty Chinese side-kick, Hard Ahn.”

“Jesus.” The morning was turning into a minefield for Poppy. “Where did you pick that up?”

He did not offer an answer. Poppy would know he would not pass on that kind of information just to make mischief. Nor would he volunteer how he got it. She would not believe a lead from Charley Buckles. Even with Allie nailing it down. Listen to Charley when he was alive and you could get an unauthorized history of South Midland. Dead men tell tales, Charley liked to say. Don't believe that other stuff. “Have Willie check it out. You wouldn't want the Worm to get hold of that. Too bad Koppel didn't have it. Been a lot more interesting than George Bernard Shaw.”

She was already punching in a number on her cell phone.

“Protector of family values like yourself, and your campaign's being backed by the films of Cowboy Collins. You have a favorite?
Bucking Brenda
?”

She ignored him. Insistently into the phone: “Pick up, Willie, pick up.” Finally.

“Willie. What took you so long? The Loomis Cattle Company . . .”

“. . . Riding Regina
?
Cowboy and Indians . . .”

Poppy wheeled toward him. “Will you shut up?”

J.J. picked up the harmonic tremor of unhappiness. He rolled over contentedly, tucking a pillow under his head.

He dozed. In the fading background he could hear Poppy ordering Willie Erskine to find out all he could about a contribution from the Loomis Cattle Company, and to figure out a way to return it quickly and quietly. In the haze of half-sleep, he wondered if Poppy had ever slept with Willie Erskine. No. Willie was double-locked and dead-bolted in the closet. And Poppy would never sleep with anyone on the payroll. Too risky. Too much economic incentive. A vineyard of extortion or exposure. No man is a hero to his valet, or whatever the female equivalent is. Even with the confidentiality clause in the employment contract she made all her staff sign. Easy to sneak around that one. No, no, no, no. If Poppy did it, she would insist on someone who regarded avoidance of risk as not just a virtue but a necessity. Probably married. Definitely someone important. Or better yet, self-important. Maybe a woman. No. Don't think so. But. But what? There were whispers. A hint. No. Let that rest. I'm liberated. To a point.

He turned over, fighting sleep. Why? Why these bad thoughts, like dark scudding clouds in a twister? He knew why. So he didn't have to think about Emmett. He could scarcely remember what his brother looked like. The only photograph he still had was sealed in an unmarked envelope in a locked desk drawer at his office. Forgetting what happened was not an option. As hard as he tried. Would still try. Emmett grasping for air, going under, his spindly three-year-old arms flailing in the water, then floating, facedown under the boat dock. And up on the hill, Walter, chained to his wheelchair. Trying to get to the dock. Falling forward, the braces on his polio-withered legs locked so that he could not move. Crawling. Pulling himself forward, his fingers digging into the grass and into the soft turf. It's not your fault, Jamie, he had said. It's not your fault. He knew. J.J. knew that he knew. Think of something else. God, Charley Buckles was fat. And there was Percy Darrow with duct tape over his mouth to stop his screaming, handcuffed, carried feet first from the holding cell into the chamber with his legs in plastic restraints. The restraint team was wearing hard hats, tinted face shields, and body armor. “A cell extraction,” the tie-down manual called it. Extraction. What dentists did to a diseased tooth. Percy Darrow was a diseased tooth. Q.E.D.

Poppy was shaking him. Poppy was dressed. Poppy in severe designer black.

“J.J.”

He snapped awake.

“I've got Willie on that.”

J.J. did not think he had ever seen a Dolores Del Rio movie. “You want to fuck?”

“I have a coffee.” She picked up her bag. “Then a women's forum. But tomorrow. After the 5-K Run. I'll make some private time.”

“Private time lacks a certain spontaneity.”

Poppy checked her appearance in the mirror until her eyes caught his. “Is that what you have with Allie? Spontaneity?”

Of course she would have known about Allie Vasquez. Willie would have heard. Willie would have dropped hints.

“Spontaneity, yes.” He wondered why she brought it up now. All right. Her way. “And enthusiasm.”

Accused Parlance Killers: “Not Guilty”

WEB POSTED 13:29

Regent, SM (ABCNEWS.COM)—In a brief arraignment at the Loomis County Courthouse today, court-appointed lawyers for Bryant Gover and Duane Lajoie, accused of the brutal slaying of Edgar Parlance last month, pleaded their clients not guilty before Judge Ellen Tracy, who will preside over the trial.

The state was represented by Maurice Dodd, a senior prosecutor in the Attorney General's office. Dodd said that he would press vigorously for the death penalty for both defendants.

Gover is represented by Francis Howar of Regent and Lajoie by Earle Lincoln from nearby Questa. Refusing to answer questions after the arraignment, Howar told reporters that he would argue his client's case in court and not in the press. Lincoln, who only passed the bar in June, also declined comment.

Because of the sensitivity of the case, which is expected to draw full media coverage, Judge Tracy, a veteran jurist, was selected by lottery from a pool of senior judges.

Present at the arraignment was Los Angeles Clippers superstar Jamaal Jefferson, who flew in to Regent by chartered helicopter after his private jet brought him to Capital City from Indianapolis, where the Pacers beat the Clippers last night 107–92.

Jefferson had paid for the Parlance funeral last week.

On behalf of the NBA and Cyrus Ichabod, CEO of I-Bod, the sneaker and sportswear conglomerate, Jefferson presented a $10,000 check to Clyde Ray, 59, who identified Lajoie's pickup as it sped from the location where Parlance was killed on the night of the murder. This identification led to the arrest of the two former ex-felons.

Ray was able to remember the 1989 Ford pickup by an obscene sticker on its rear bumper.

CHAPTER ONE

This is a story Teresa Kean told me.

If I were a writer, not a lawyer, or as good a writer as I am a lawyer, I would have introduced her earlier. Since you could say this narrative is about her. Because without Teresa, there is no narrative. If you were giving billing, she is above the title.

Prima inter pares.

J.J.'s above the title, too. And I suppose Carlyle.

Although you haven't met her yet either.

In due course.

Anyway.

My elaboration on Teresa's story.

During Poppy's first two terms in Congress, J.J. would occasionally visit her when the House was sitting. “What do you do, Mr. McClure?” a party functionary once asked him at a Heritage Foundation cocktail party. “Other than being Poppy's husband, that is.”

“I put people in prison,” J.J. said. “Other than being Poppy's husband, that is.”

You can see why he hated it there.

He spent an awful lot of time in green rooms waiting for Poppy to finish whatever chat show she was on. The last time he went to Washington, Poppy was interviewed on C-Span by Brian Lamb. J.J. was alone in the green room with all the morning papers and a table covered with Snapple iced tea and bottled water and bagels and cream cheese. Poppy was live on one of the two monitors, and on the other there was a rerun of a three-hour interview about books with Joyce Carol Oates. About halfway through Poppy's show, a P.A. came in and asked if he needed anything. She was tall, blond, coltish, about twenty-seven, wearing a black T-shirt, black linen culottes, and a black cotton sweater knotted around her waist. Her hair was pulled together with a tortoiseshell barrette. She said she was a great fan of Joyce Carol Oates's, that an old boyfriend would give her copies of Oates's books as birthday and Christmas presents. She said she no longer had the boyfriend, but still had the books. Then she asked again if there was anything she could do for him.

Yes, J.J. said.

He never did get her name.

They began going at it while Poppy was on live, taking listener calls, doing her rap. On the other monitor, Joyce Carol Oates hid behind her tinted glasses. The P.A. said someone might walk in and see them, they had to stop or go in the bathroom, lock the door, and do it in there. J.J. brought the cream cheese with him. He pulled up her T-shirt, spread cream cheese on her breasts, and started to lick it away. She pushed him onto the toilet seat and began sucking him off. J.J. lifted her off her knees, turned her around, bent her over the sink, and fucked her. When he was done, he pulled up his trousers and started to wipe the remains of the cream cheese from her breasts with a damp paper towel. She took the towel from him, said she would do it herself, and sent him back to the green room while she finished getting dressed.

On the monitors, Poppy was finishing up her interview, while Joyce Carol Oates was deep into an explanation of how the literary ecology between the senator who was not Ted Kennedy and the young woman who was not Mary Jo Kopechne led her to write
Black Water.
Brian Lamb signed off, and a moment or so later Poppy walked into the green room. J.J. was sitting on the couch. Good job, he said, as in the bathroom the toilet flushed and the P.A. exited, carrying the dish of cream cheese, a dab of which had stuck to her black T-shirt.

Poppy looked from J.J. to the P.A. and then back at J.J. There was a small smear of cheese on his upper lip.

You didn't, she said equably. It was as if the P.A. were not present.

Poppy, you are embarrassing this young woman, J.J. said. Then he guided Poppy out of the green room, out of the C-Span building, and into her waiting car.

J.J. never returned to Washington after that visit.

I may have added some details, but the cream cheese came from Teresa.

CHAPTER TWO

From an unpublished manuscript written by Teresa Kean and stored on her laptop in a locked folder called
RECIPES
. Also in the folder was a haphazard collection of notes, observations, and miscellaneous journal entries.

My father was a gangster. He was, in fact, a murderer. I don't know how many people he actually killed, but there were two cut-and-paste biographies about him and about his role in the opening up of Las Vegas, and he is listed in
The Encyclopedia of American Crime
as a top hit man, the murderer of twenty or so people, perhaps even more. He did not of course advertise the number and names of his alleged victims, or the means by which he allegedly dispatched them, but then neither did he deny the claims, his silence only further gilding the myth he seemed, according the tattered clippings about his life, to so enjoy. Firearms, piano wire, explosive devices, claw hammers, screwdrivers, suffocation, battery, drowning—his chroniclers claimed there was no form of mayhem in which he did not exhibit a master's skill.

My father never knew he was my father. He was shotgunned to death before he knew my mother was pregnant. He was building a hotel in Las Vegas called King's Playland (his name was Jacob King), and there were shortfalls and overruns, and he was hit. The shooter was a childhood friend. (“Hit” and “shooter” were in the rhetorical style of both books written about Jacob King, books which, when I finally read them, I found essentially worthless, a compendium of clips and rumors and self-aggrandizement, but then of course I had an emotional investment in believing in their paltriness and inconsequence.) It was only after my father was murdered that my mother discovered that she was pregnant. They were of course not married. My mother was a movie star. A child movie star who was trying to cross over and become a grown-up movie star. Her name was Blue Tyler, and if she is remembered now largely as a crossword puzzle entry or a question on
Jeopardy!,
there was a time in her prepubescent and adolescent years in which her name on a marquee was a guarantee of gold. The crossover did not happen. Jacob King's occupation and his dramatic and bloody demise, both of which fell under the moral-turpitude clause in a motion-picture contract, were two good reasons, my mother's putative talent for fellatio and her equally putative appreciation of a prominent phallus were two more, two that to a certain degree are my only inheritance from her.

I never knew my mother. She worked for a while in Europe, and then she disappeared for nearly forty years until Jack—dear, dear Jack—found her quite by accident in Detroit, and although he patiently dug into her past, and pieced together my identity and that of my adoptive parents, he refused to engage in any public or private discussion about these discoveries or about my mother's subsequent gruesomely unpleasant death (she was crushed under the wheels of an eighteen-wheel refrigerator rig), which may have been suicide or, equally possible, the result of a final descent into madness. Daddy—my adoptive father, Brendan Kean—knew my real father even before Jacob King met my real mother. Brendan Kean was a former homicide prosecutor in Queens turned criminal defense attorney in private practice, and in 1947, in Department 50, the Manhattan Criminal Courthouse on Centre Street, he defended Jacob King on a charge of first-degree murder, a murder he almost certainly committed, and won him an acquittal. The not-guilty verdict was a significant reason why Jacob King left New York for California, where he took up with my mother, so it might be argued that Brendan Kean played a crucial, if unintentional, role in charting the destiny of my parents, and I suppose mine too.

Daddy always insisted that he did not know the identity of my birth parents (I hate that phrase; it is so clinical and professional, so absent the tears and feelings that scald relationships), but he was no less dogged than Jack. Given Daddy's background as both prosecutor and defense counsel in the city's five boroughs, and the concomitant network of allegiances he had built up in the criminal and civil bar, it is not a leap to suppose that he made discreet inquiries, probate searches in the records of the Manhattan Surrogate Court, and educated guesses that supplied enough circumstantial evidence for him to intuit who my natural parents were, at the very least to an indisputable level of probability. The measure of Brendan Kean, and of his ability to keep his own counsel, is that he never imparted any of this information, or speculation, to me.

He and my mother, Moira Twomey Kean, were childless, but I suspect it was Daddy's successful representation of Jacob King, coupled with his professional ability to sidestep unnecessary and perhaps troubling legal and moral questions, that ultimately led Blue Tyler's advisors and the ex-officio executors of Jacob King's affairs (some, perhaps even most, it is safe to surmise, on the shady side of the law), acting in concert, to offer Brendan and Moira Kean the opportunity to adopt the six-pound-thirteen-ounce daughter they named Teresa. Daddy, in his seventies, was still vigorously practicing when he died in a small plane crash on the way to his summer house on that stretch of the Jersey shore called the Irish Riviera; at Manhattan Federal Court, on the Wednesday morning he was killed, he had an insider trading case dismissed for official misconduct, and decided to fly down to Mantoloking and spend the rest of the week celebrating with my mother. She now lives in a retirement community in northern Virginia, drifting in and out of Alzheimer's. I regularly send her gifts—fruit baskets, expensive chocolates, Pratesi robes, even electronic gadgets I know she cannot possibly master, like an eight-band shortwave radio or a five-inch color television that she can perch on her lap—to paper over my guilt for not going to see her more regularly, since more often than not she does not recognize me. Yet occasionally she flashes like a lightbulb before its filament burns out, and I receive a note in her spidery arthritic hand.
Dear Teresa Kean
is always the salutation on these communiqués, as if she corresponded with more than one Teresa.

Here is an example:

Dear Teresa Kean,

God bless you for sending the toy television set. It is so cute. I watched a show yesterday about a lawyer, and I thought about your dear father and my dear husband Brendan. I don't know if you knew he was a lawyer, but he was, Brendan Kean, Attorney-at-Law. Mrs. Eisenhower in the next room is 85 years of age, and since she came here five years ago, she has always had a TV, a color model. I do not know why she calls herself Eisenhower, because I know for a fact that she was not married to the general. She has such airs, like she was. In all those five years, she never invited me once into her room to look at her color TV. Yesterday her color TV fell to the floor and broke. It made a terrible noise, and it made her very sad. She knocked on my door and she asked if she could come into my room and look at the toy TV you sent me, and I said, Fuck you.

Your loving mother,
Moira Twomey Kean

 

My father was Queens born and bred, having worked his way up the social ladder from the top floor of an underheated three-family house in Ozone Park, with grottoes to the Immaculate Heart on every balcony, to a community in Forest Hills Gardens with lawns and a twenty-four-hour private security patrol in unmarked cars, and every summer the house in Mantoloking. His father, my grandfather, was a bus driver for the Transit Authority and on election days stuffed ballot boxes for the Queens Democratic Party, purely as a precaution, according to Daddy, and not because they needed to be stuffed. He died when my father was ten. Daddy called Manhattan “the city” and the subway “the train,” and every morning he took the E-train from Continental Avenue to his law office and the courthouses downtown, returning from the Chambers Street station on the E-train back to Forest Hills every evening. Playing hockey in the seventh grade at St. Cyril's in Ozone Park, he had his features rearranged by a hockey puck that flattened his nose and gave him the look of a man who in a fight would come after you with a beer bottle in his hand. Belligerence came naturally to him and revealed itself in the most unexpected way. He hated the pageantry of police funerals, to which he had often been summoned when he was a prosecutor, hated even more the skirl of bagpipes that attended the deceased and had the same effect on him as fingernails scraping down a blackboard. It's just a photo op so the mayor and the commissioner can throw their arms around the grieving widow and get their pictures in the
News,
he would tell me. Christ, just once I'd like some cop widow to say, Blow it out your ass, Mr. Mayor, I don't want you or your bagpipes here when I plant Sean, he got on top of me six times in eleven years, that's the five girls and Sean, Jr., who's slow.

Daddy went to mass every Sunday at St. Pius V in Forest Hills, and smoked outside, winter and summer, one unfiltered Camel after another, never entering the church, waiting there until the service was over and my mother appeared clutching the Sunday announcements. He was thirty years into his marriage before he learned that Moira Kean believed in God no more than he. “You never asked,” my mother said when he wondered why she had never told him. And he never had. It was the kind of mistake he never would make in the courtroom, and perhaps indicated the state of their marriage. And yet as far as I know, he was faithful to her, I would guess out of some residual parochial-school training. (That she might have been unfaithful to him was beyond my powers of invention.) I knew there were women within the legal system who were attracted to him, but outside of a smile and an Irish joke, he would never return the signals he must have received.

I was divorced twice before I was twenty-six. My first wedding took place the week before I graduated from Smith, three months pregnant; the marriage lasted until I miscarried. The name of the impregnator was Chipper, which says more than needs to be said about that liaison. My second husband was Furlong Budd Doheny, called Budd—the Furlongs, the Budds, and the Dohenys on his side of the marriage bed all vying for which was the richest entity. Budd Doheny's only real skills were sailing, skiing, and screwing, and with his access to the multiple family fortunes, he was never out of season and rarely out of bed. Sex with him was, more often than I care to remember, a group production, with many of its moments captured on film, both still and video, all of which he carefully catalogued. Budd's powers of invention seldom waned— he was the only person I was ever aware of who used vanilla extract as a sex aid—I will leave it to your imagination where he applied it on his person—but in time the appeal of esoteric erotica paled (to this day I detest the taste of vanilla and the smell of vanilla beans), and we went our separate ways more or less amicably, in large part because in the divorce I made no claim on the vast resources of the Furlongs, the Budds, or the Dohenys. A few years and several wives later, Budd Doheny drowned in a one-man-one-boat ocean race, the victim of rogue waves and 60-knot winds somewhere in the rolling Tasman deep between Auckland and Hobart (his bodily remains were lashed to his splintered mainmast when the wreckage of his capsized boat was finally discovered after the freakish winds calmed). My mourning for him was perfunctory, but I confess to wondering occasionally, as middle age and the decorum attendant to it make their inroads, about the disposition of his catalogue of film and photographic erotica, or at least that part of it in which I might appear.

After my second divorce, I applied to Yale Law School, and when I graduated, I passed the bar and went to work with my father (although I chose to live on Manhattan's Upper East Side and not in Queens). Criminal law suited me, as it suited him. I was good at it, and in and out of court he was both mentor and unruffled presence at my side. The first thing he taught me was never try to convince myself that a client was innocent, it only messes you up and makes you a bad lawyer. If a client turns out to be innocent, that's a bonus: just don't count on it, he probably did something worse: a courtroom's not a cathedral and you're not the coadjutor bishop. He was comfortable with the criminal attorney's code. When the facts are against you, he said, argue the law; when the law is against you, argue the facts; when both are against you, attack the other side. Murder and the more egregious violations of the penal code did not usually attract high-powered attorneys. The reason is simple: There is not that much money in it. Outside of mystery novels, criminal defendants are rarely propertied; they tend to live on the frayed margins of society, and often do not speak the language of the courts where their cases are heard. However often they invoke the right of every defendant to have an attorney, good lawyers, as opposed to the incompetents and the shysters, tend to avoid this redlined legal zip code unless, like my father, they enjoy the game. The odds are against them. In the interest of what they call “justice,” D.A.'s really do think that defense lawyers should calibrate the vigor of their argument to the larger societal need of putting perps behind bars. Whatever their public position, prosecutors seem to regard the presumption of innocence as a kind of devil worship, and reasonable doubt as justice not served. I never asked, but I would have bet that even my father worked that side of the street when he was in the Queens D.A.'s office. The law is situational, he liked to say.

The second thing Daddy taught me was that defense attorneys do not win cases so much as prosecutors lose them. What a good defense attorney does is exploit error, because running beneath prosecutorial error is a filigree of reasonable doubt. Innocence need not be proven; guilt does. For eight years we prospered, but when he died, Kean & Kean and the prospect of continuing as a solo practitioner lost its attractiveness. At the first opportunity, I dissolved the firm and moved to Washington as an advocate for an organization lobbying on behalf of victims' rights. It was called, with a noticeable absence of imagination, Justice for All, and in time I became its president and public spokesperson on chat shows and at seminars, luncheons, conferences, and every kind of public forum. Jack said my involvement was not without irony, considering Jacob King's propensity for making victims. He said that during the twelve hours I knew him.