“What are you?”
“I don’t know what I am, Kate, but we both know it’s not a great lawyer. On a good day, I’m an okay lawyer trying his ass off. He needs a brilliant lawyer trying her ass off.”
“Excuse me?”
“Kate, it’s a figure of speech.”
It’s a good pitch. Tom didn’t waste those fifteen hours-but I don’t even think about it. The bastard could charm the birds out of the trees, but I’m not falling for it. Not TWICE. It’s a big world. He can find another sucker.
“Sorry, Tom. I can’t do it. But keep trying your ass off-you might surprise yourself.”
“Excuse me?”
“Tom, it’s a figure of speech. And thanks for the coffee.”
Chapter 47. Tom
COME WHAT MAY, I am definitely on the case now, and in the spotlight again.
Since Lucy and the Montauk Bakery don’t want my business anymore, me and Wingnut, who by the way was named after the great Knicks reserve player Harthorne Nathaniel Wingo but answers to anything with a wing in it, have been forced to refine our morning routine. Now we start our workday at that Honduran-owned grocery where no one knows our names. There I can sit alone at the outdoor table ten feet from Route 27 and try to figure out how to keep New York from executing an innocent eighteen-year-old kid.
Since I’ve taken on Dante Halleyville’s case, my days pass in a blur and end wherever I fall asleep over my notebooks. I am nothing if not dedicated, and a little crazy.
As I sit in the steep October-morning light, pickups roll in and out and traffic streams west on 27, ten feet from my nose, but I’m too preoccupied to be distracted. When Dante dredged up that “witness” on the bench from his memory, he gave me a tantalizing lead. But I’m having a hard time following up on it.
If there’s a person out there who can corroborate Dante’s version of events or saw the real killers, the state has no case. But I barely have a description, let alone a name.
Maybe Artis LaFontaine, dealer, pimp, whatever he is, stayed at the basketball court long enough to see the guy arrive, but I have no idea how to get in touch with him. If I went to the police, they might have him on their radar, but I hate to do that unless I absolutely have to.
As I take a pull of coffee, a yellow VW Bug rolls by. Yellow is the color du jour, I guess, and that makes me think of Artis’s canary-yellow convertible.
There can’t be that many places where a person can buy a $400,000 Ferrari, right?
I flip open my cell and start using up my minutes. The dealership in Hempstead refers me to an exotic-car dealership on Eleventh Avenue in Manhattan. They refer me to a dealership in Greenwich, Connecticut.
Two hours later, still at my outdoor office on the side of the road, I’m talking to Bree Elizabeth Pedi. Bree Elizabeth is the top salesperson at the Miami Auto Emporium in South Beach. “Of course I know Artis. He’s putting my kids through college.”
I persuade Pedi to give Artis a call, and a couple minutes later, Artis is on the line, but he’s chillier than I expect. “If you’re calling about that night at the basketball court, I wasn’t there.”
“Artis, if I have to, I’ll subpoena you.”
“First you got to find me.”
“Dante’s facing the death penalty. You know something, and you’re going to keep it to yourself?”
“You don’t know Loco. I’ll do time rather than testify against him. But as long as you understand that I was NOT THERE, I might be able to help.”
I describe the man lying on the bench, and Artis knows who I’m talking about right away.
“You’re looking for Manny Rodriguez,” he says. “Like everyone else, he’s an aspiring rapper. He told me he works for a tiny label called Cold Ground, Inc. I bet they’re in the phone book.”
Chapter 48. Tom
OKAY, SO NOW I’m an amateur detective. And I’m back in Manhattan because Cold Ground, Inc., turns out to be in a funky postwar building right below Union Square.
A mirrored elevator drops me on seven, where a thumping bass line pulls me down a maroon-and-yellow hallway and the scent of reefer takes me the rest of the way.
Inside the last door on the left, a little hip-hop factory is chugging industriously. What had been the living room of a one-bedroom apartment is now a recording studio.
Behind a glass wall a baby-faced rapper, his immaculate Yankee cap precisely askew, rhythmically spits rhymes into a brass microphone.
I ice him and vanish
No trace of what I done
Finding me is harder
Than finding a smoking gun
The artist looks no more than seventeen and neither does his girl, who sits on the leather couch on the other side of the glass with an infant on her lap dressed just like his dad, right down to the cockeyed cap and retro Nikes. A dozen others are scattered around, and whether dazzlingly elongated or powerfully compact, they all seem like the fullest expression of who they are.
Who is in charge? No one that I can tell, and there’s no desk or receptionist in front.
“Manny’s making dupes,” says a tall woman named Erica, and she nods helpfully when a cable-thin guy with a jet-black ponytail steps out of a back room.
In Manny’s arms is a stack of what look like pizza boxes. “Got to deliver these to another studio,” he says, heading out the door. “Come and we’ll talk on the way.”
In a crosstown cab, Manny lays down the plotlines of his frenetic life. “I was born in Havana,” he says. “My father was a doctor. A good one, which meant he made a hundred dollars a month. One morning, after a great big breakfast, I got on an eight-foot sailboat, pushed off from the beach, and just kept going. Twenty hours later, I almost drowned swimming to shore fifty miles south of Miami. I was wearing this watch. If I died, I died, but I had to come to America.”
Three years later, Manny says he’s a break away from becoming the Cuban-American Eminem. “I’m dope, and I’m not the only one who knows it.”
I suspect he’s confused about why I’m here, but I’ll set him straight in a minute. We get off on West Twenty-first Street in front of a Chelsea townhouse, and he drops his tapes at another apartment-turned-recording-studio.
“I’m not going to be doing this much longer,” he tells me.
I offer to buy him lunch around the corner at the Empire Diner, and we take a seat at a black-lacquered table overlooking Tenth Avenue.
“So what label you with?” Manny asks once our orders are in.
“I’m not with a label, Manny. I’m a lawyer, and I’m representing Dante Halleyville. He’s falsely charged with killing three people at Smitty Wilson’s court in East Hampton. I know you were there that night. I’m hoping you saw something that can save his life.”
If Manny is disappointed that I’m not a talent scout looking to sign him to a huge deal, he keeps it to himself. He looks at me hard, as if he’s running through his loop of images from that night.
“You’re the ballplayer,” he says. “I seen you there. You were a pro.”
“That’s right. For about ten minutes.”
“You got a tape recorder?” he asks.
“No, but I’ve got a pad. I’ll take careful notes for now.”
“Good. Let me hit the bathroom. Then maybe I got a story that could save that tall black boy.”
I wrestle my legal pad out of my case and hurriedly scribble a list of key questions in my barely legible shorthand. Stay calm, I tell myself, and listen.