“What?” I said, sounding as shocked as possible. At the same nanosecond, a quart of adrenaline dumped into my bloodstream and a familiar rush surged into my nerves, setting them tingling, jangling, and twanging like the strings of an electric guitar.
Believe.
“Your Honor, I would never do such a thing! I couldn’t even begin to do such a thing. Who can divine what a jury is thinking, much less attempt to control it?”
Judge Kroungold’s eyes glittered. “Oh, really. Then you won’t mind if I suggest to the jury that the death was in Mr. Vandivoort’s family, not yours.”
Shit. Was he bluffing, too? This game could cost me my license to play cards—I mean, practice law. “On the contrary, Your Honor. I would object to any attempt to gain the jury’s sympathy for male counsel, whom you are clearly favoring. In fact, I move that you recuse yourself immediately on the grounds that you are partial to defense counsel, sir.”
Judge Kroungold reddened. “
Recuse
myself? Step down? On the last day of trial?”
Up the ante. “Yes, sir. I wasn’t sure until today, but now you’ve made your sexism quite clear.”
“My
sexism
?” He practically choked on the word, since he fancied himself a liberal with a true respect for women. Like Bill Clinton.
“Are you denying my motion, Your Honor?”
“I most certainly am! It’s absurd. Frivolous! You’d lose on appeal,” Judge Kroungold shot back, but he twitched the tiniest bit.
It was my opening and I drove for it. I had a straight flush and a dead mother. I
believed
. “With all due respect, Your Honor, I disagree. This sidebar is interrupting my cross-examination of a critical witness. Every minute I stand here prejudices my client’s case. If I could proceed, perhaps I could put this ugly incident behind me. Mr. Vandivoort didn’t object to my questioning, after all.”
Kroungold snapped his head in Vandivoort’s direction. “Mr. Vandivoort, don’t you have an objection?”
I looked at Vandivoort, dead-on. “Can you really believe I would do such a terrible thing, George?” The pot is yours if you can call me a liar to my face. In open court, on the record.
Vandivoort looked at Judge Kroungold, then at me, and back again. “Uh … I have no objection,” he said, folding even easier than my Uncle Sal. Vandivoort was too much of a gentleman, that was his problem. Biology is destiny. It’s in the cards.
“Then may I proceed, Your Honor?”
“Wait a minute, I’m not done with you, Ms. Morrone. Stay here.” Judge Kroungold scowled at Vandivoort. “Mr. Vandivoort, take your seat.”
What was this? Not according to Hoyle, surely.
Judge Kroungold signaled to Wesley as soon as Vandivoort bounced away, and Wesley got the convenient urge to stop typing and crack his knuckles.
What gives?
Judge Kroungold leaned over the dais. “I’ve been reading about you in the newspapers, Ms. Morrone, so I can’t say I’m surprised by your showmanship. But I warn you. Play all the tricks you want. It might work in this case, but it won’t work in
Sullivan
. You’re in over your head in
Sullivan.
”
It gave me a start, like he was jinxing me, but I couldn’t think about
Sullivan
now. “Then may I proceed, sir?”
“Of course, Ms. Morrone,” Judge Kroungold said loudly. “Ladies first.” He leaned back and waved to Wesley to go back on the record.
“Thank you, Your Honor,” I said, and turned to face my jury. But not before I remembered my bereavement and brushed an ersatz tear from my eye.
Which is when I caught a glistening behind the engineer’s glasses.
Winner take all.
2
I
shifted position on the stool that had been my perch in the butcher shop since I was a kid. Grayish stuffing puffed out of a rip in the green vinyl cushion, exposing the top of a steel pole. I didn’t know which was making me more uncomfortable, the steel pole or my father’s silent treatment. Frankly, I’d rather sit on the goddamn pole.
“Dad, you’re not happy for me?” I asked.
Thwack!
His stocky frame bent over a rack of fresh lamb and he separated two chops with a familiar cleaver and more vigor than necessary.
“I won four hundred grand, you know.”
Thwack!
Thick steel-rimmed glasses slipped down his bulbous nose. Gray chest hair strayed from an open button on his white uniform. His bald dome bore a constellation of liver spots, like a planetarium.
“The jury was only out for an hour. An hour, that’s nothing.”
Thwack!
No lamb deserved this kind of treatment. Neither did the meat.
“Dad, if you don’t talk to me, I’m going home to my boyfriend who doesn’t talk to me.”
He cleared his throat. “I don’t like it, what you did in court. It wasn’t right.”
“Why not? I won, didn’t I?”
“I didn’t raise you that way!” He brandished the cleaver at me but I barely flinched, I’ve grown so accustomed to my father threatening me with sharp objects. You name it—boner, slicer, butcher’s needle—I’ve had it an inch from my nose. It’s good training for litigation.
“How did you raise me?”
“I raised you to be a good girl.”
“Good girls make bad lawyers, Pop.”
“Hah!” He returned to his work, squinting as he positioned the chops on a wooden carving block. It was dark with blood at its concave center and knifemarks scored its surface. “Hah!” he said again, but didn’t elaborate.
Thwack!
My victory champagne was wearing off. I crossed my legs in the offending suit, breathed in the spicy smells of the shop, and watched the sluggish traffic through the neon letters in the MORRONE’S MEATS sign, with its glowing orange pig. My father’s shop was in the Italian Market, a city district of stores and outdoor stands hawking fresh crabs, squid, and poultry alongside detergent, pantyhose, and sponge mops. Cars crept down Ninth Street, navigating between the stalls and debris like an urban Scylla and Charybdis.
“They should clean up here,” I said to no father in particular. “Pick up the garbage. Don’t you think?”
Thwack!
Wooden pallets and cardboard boxes were piled in the gutter; pictures of apples smiled from the boxes and the California oranges looked positively giddy. But the fruit pictures were the only thing smiling in the market lately. An arsonist had burned Palumbo’s restaurant to the ground, tearing the heart out of the neighborhood, and a Vietnamese jewelry store down the street was robbed at gunpoint last week. My father’s shop hadn’t been hit. He thought the crooks respected him; I thought they knew he was broke.
“Dad, when are you going to sell this place?”
Thwack!
His glasses, owing to their weight, slipped to the bumpy end of his nose. His eyesight was worsening daily; he was becoming the Mr. Magoo of butchers. He’d knife himself someday, if somebody else didn’t.
“Come on, Dad. You’re not mad at me for the trial, you’re mad because of the
Sullivan
case.”
“Right.”
Vito speaks! “How long you gonna stay mad?”
“Forever.”
Such a reasonable man. “Dad, you want to discuss this rationally for a change?”
“Fine, Miss Fresh Mouth.”
My full name. Usually he shortened it to Miss Fresh. “Listen, Fiske Hamilton is a federal judge, one of the most respected on the bench. He needed a lawyer, so he came to me. What’s wrong with that?”
“You’re livin’ with his son.”
“Yeah, so?” I lived with Paul Hamilton without benefit of marriage. The fact still rankled my father, even though he didn’t like Paul at all. Just one of the many paradoxes that made up Vito Morrone.
Thwack!
“Dad?”
“Like I said,” he said cryptically.
LeVonne Bayson, who was sweeping up sawdust in the corner, smiled to himself. LeVonne was the shy black teenager who worked for my father. We all pretended LeVonne was there to help with the customers, but that wasn’t the real reason. There weren’t enough customers to keep even my father busy, or my Uncle Sal, who hung out in the shop from time to time.
“LeVonne,” I called out, “do you know what this man is talking about? Can you translate for me? Would you tell the butcher I’m very happy to be in his country?”
LeVonne smiled like someone on a TV on mute and continued rearranging the sawdust.
Thwack!
“What? What’sa matter, she don’t understand English, Professor? Tell her it means ‘like I said.’”
LeVonne shook his head, showing the wisdom not to referee. His skin was smooth, he was on the small side, and his features were still boyish as he looked down over the worn end of the broomstick. He wore his hair cut close to his head and a sparse patch of black fuzz was beginning to sprout under his chin.
“Why don’t you just talk to me, Dad?”
“You shoulda said no. No. N-O.”
“Turned down the
Sullivan
case? Why? It’s the biggest sexual harassment case in the country, it’s once-in-a-lifetime.”
“That’s why you’re doing it?”
Partly. “Christ, what was I supposed to do? Say ‘Look, Judge, I know you’re in trouble and I’m a hot-shit lawyer
and
I’m practically engaged to your son, but can you just take your business elsewhere?’”
“Hmph.” He wiped the cleaver on his apron and dropped it into the slot beside the carving board. Then he grabbed a well-worn boning knife, sliced a sliver of spongy fat from a chop, and threw the fat into a dented bucket. “Rita, did you ever think the judge mighta done it? Huh?”
I had, but I rejected it. “Fiske Hamilton? He’s a class act, Dad. A Yale grad, a partner at Morgan Lewis for ten years before he went on the bench. He didn’t harass her. I asked him and he denied it.”
Milky brown eyes flared behind his glasses. “It said in the paper he was chasin’ her around the office, right in the courthouse. It was in the
Daily News
, did you see?”
“You gonna believe everything you read?”
“You gonna believe everything you hear?” He laughed, then looked over at LeVonne. “Mr. President, you like that one?” he shouted, and LeVonne smiled his secret smile.
“Dad, this woman’s asking for three million dollars in damages. Intentional infliction of emotional distress, the whole works. She just wants to make a quick buck, that’s all there is to it.”
“No, I saw that girl’s picture, I saw that girl’s face, and I’m tellin’ you, she’s not doin’ it for the money.” He flopped the chop over and trimmed the remaining streaks of fat from the moist, pink flesh. A trickle of thin blood oozed onto the carving board, a lighter color than the Jackson Pollock bloodstains on his apron. This was why I became a vegetarian, no question.
“Dad, why are you still mad about this? It’s a done deal. I take her deposition tomorrow.”
“I don’t care how classy the judge is, I don’t like him usin’ my daughter.”
It stung. “He’s not using me.”
“The judge was screwin’ around on his wife and he thinks you’ll cover it up. He’s bluffin’ you and you don’t even see it.”
“He’s not bluffing. I asked him, I watched him answer.”
He wagged the knife at me. “Don’t watch the player, watch the cards. You got the cards in front of you and you’re not lookin’ at them. He’s playin’ you for a chump.”
“But I know Fiske. He’s Paul’s father. He’s family.”
“Whose family? You’re not married, so the judge ain’t family. I don’t know him, wouldn’t know him if I ran over him.”
I stifled a laugh at my father’s choice of words. His eyesight was so poor he ran over two bicycles and a child’s foot last year. Remarkably, the foot was fine, but the Schwinns were DOA.
“Dad, Fiske is a federal judge.”
“Oh, yeah? So what’s he got between his legs—a gavel?”
So genteel. My father loved to talk dirty; it was his favorite thing, after butchering lambs and running over the toes of small children. His coarseness drove my mother nuts until she fooled us both and had the last laugh.
“Mark my words,” he said, making circles in the air with the pointy knife. “I’ve been around the block a few times.”
“Not in the car, I hope.”
LeVonne actually laughed out loud, or at least audibly. My father managed a smile, too, but I think it was at the lamb chops. There on the carving board, in carnal tribute to his skill, stood twelve pink chops, evenly sliced and arranged like a king’s crown. “Ain’t that pretty?” he said.
“It’s art, Vito.”
“Miss Fresh Mouth.”
“You’re the one. You.”
Silence fell while we both cooled down. I knew we would, we always did. Coming apart and coming together, like pigeons fussing on a street corner. It had been like this for as long as I could remember. He had raised me by himself, in this shop. I cut my first chicken at age eight and my first deck of cards the year later. An atypical girlhood, we’ll leave it at that.
“All right, the chops are pretty,” I said finally.
He nodded. “So. You want something to take home? I got nice Delmonicos in the back.”
“No thanks. I don’t eat dead things, remember?” I watched him set the lamb on an old white scale. On its side were yellowed stickers from Licenses and Inspections and a gold star from some forgotten something when I was little. He peered down through his bifocals to read the numbers on the scale.
“Miss Priss. You need red meat. It’s good for you, gives you protein.”
Right. “Anyway, I want to go out and eat. To celebrate.”
“Take the steaks, honey.” He winked and wrapped up the chops. “Stay in and celebrate.”
I forced a smile. My father didn’t know Paul and I hadn’t been getting along. I’d been trying not to worry about it, it happened in a relationship. I’d hoped it would change with
Sullivan
. Paul was close to his parents and was already showing an interest in his father’s defense. We were talking more than we ever had. It was the reason I’d taken the case, even though judges and butchers apparently disapproved.
And it didn’t matter, really, whether Judge Hamilton had harassed his secretary or not.
All that mattered was that I had to win.
3