Back in the office I sat at the quiet of my desk and ignored the message slips handed me by Ellie. I thought of things, thought of my neediness and my deprivations and how much I wanted out. I wanted out so desperately it hurt as bad as a lost love. I had to get out, for reasons that haunted half the lawyers in the country and for darker, more sinister reasons that Beth could never know. Everything was against my ever leaving, sure, except for how fiercely I wanted out. I sat and daydreamed about winning the lottery and dripping paint on canvases in the Hamptons with a gin and tonic in my hand and then I stopped daydreaming and thought about the Reddmans.
Guys like me, we don’t often brush shoulders with that much money and to accidentally rub up against it, like I did in that bank, does something ugly to us. It’s like seeing the most beautiful woman in the world walk by, a woman who makes you ache just to look at her, and knowing that she’ll never even glance in your direction, which slips the ache in even deeper. I thought about the Reddmans and all they were born to and I ached. More than anything in this world, I wish I had been born rich. It would have made up for everything. I’d still be ugly, sure, but I’d be rich and ugly. I’d still be weak and dim and tongue-tied with women, but I’d be rich enough for them not to care. I’d no longer be a social misfit, I’d be eccentric. And most of all, I’d no longer be what I was, I’d be something different. I thought about it all and let the pain of my impoverishment wash over me and then I started making calls.
“I don’t have time to chitchat,” said Detective McDeiss over the phone, after I had tracked him down to the Criminal Justice Building. “You need something from me, you can go through the D.A.”
“It’s not about an active prosecution,” I said. “The case I want to talk about is old and closed. Jacqueline Shaw.”
There was a pause and a deep breath. “The heiress.”
“I like that word, don’t you?”
“Yeah, well, this one hung herself. What could there possibly be left to talk about?”
“I don’t know. I just want to get some background. I’m representing the sister.”
“Good for you, Carl. It’s a step up I guess from your usual low-class grease-bucket clientele. How did you ever hook onto her?”
“She chased me down the street with a gun.”
“Tell me about it, you slimeball.”
“You free for lunch tomorrow?”
“To talk about Jacqueline Shaw?”
“Exactly. My treat.”
“Your treat, huh?” There was a pause while McDeiss reprioritized his day. “You eat Chinese, Carl?”
“I’m Jewish, aren’t I?” I said.
“All right then, one o’clock,” and he tossed out an address before hanging up. I knew that McDeiss wanted nothing to do with me, disdain dripped thick as oil from his voice, but in the last few years I had learned something about cops and one of the things I had learned was that there was not a cop on the force who would turn down a free lunch, even if it was just a $4.25 luncheon special at some Chinatown dive with fried rice and an egg roll soggy with grease.
Except the address he tossed out was not to some Chinatown dive, it was to Susanna Foo, the fanciest, priciest Chinese restaurant in the city.
6
PETER CRESSI HAD A DARK, Elvisine look that just sort of melted women. He told me so in his own modest way, but he was right. Take the way our secretary, Ellie, reacted after he walked by whenever he walked by. She stared at him as he strutted past, her eyes popping, her mouth agape, and then, when the door was closed, she let out a sort of helpless giggle. He was a tomato for sure, Cressi, Big Boy or beefsteak, one of them, and from my dealings with him I knew him to be just about as smart. He was actually a little brighter than he looked, but then again he’d have to be.
“How’s it hanging wit’ you, Vic?” he said to me as he sat indolently in the chair across from my desk. “Low?” His dark eyes were partly brooding, partly blank, as if he were angry at something he couldn’t quite remember. His lemon tie, delicious and bright against his black shirt, was tied with entirely too much care.
“It’s not hanging so terrifically, Pete,” I said, shaking my head at him. “Next time you buy an arsenal, try not to purchase it from an undercover cop.”
Peter gave me a wink and looked off to the side, bobbing his head up and down as he chuckled at some private little joke. Cressi chuckled a lot, little he-he-he’s coming through his Elvis lips. “Who knew?”
“Good answer. That’s exactly what we’ll tell the jury.”
That chuckle again. “Just say I’m a collector.”
I opened the file and scanned the police report. “One hundred and seventy-nine Ruger Mini-14 semiautomatics with folding fiberglass stocks and two hundred kits for illegally modifying said firearms for fully automatic performance.”
“That’s what you should tell them I was collecting.”
“Also three grenade launchers and a flamethrower. A flamethrower, Peter. Jesus. What the hell did you need a flamethrower for?”
“A weenie roast?”
“That’s what your trial is going to be unless you sharpen up and get serious. You were also trying to buy twenty thousand rounds of ammunition.”
“Me and the guys, like we sometimes target shoot out in the woods.”
“What woods are we talking about here, Peter? They got any woods in South Philly I don’t know about? Like there’s a block just south of Washington they forgot to put a row of crappy houses on, it just slipped their minds?”
“Now you being funny, Vic.” His head bobbing, the he-he-he’s coming like an underpowered lawn mower. “Upstate, I’m talking. You know, bottles and cans. Maybe next time you want I should ask you along? It’s good to keep in training, if you know what I mean. And every now and then a stray bird it lands like a douche bag on the target and then, what do you think, bam, it’s just feathers floating.”
“Seriously, Pete. Why the guns?”
His eyes darkened. “I’m being serious as a fucking heart attack.”
He looked at me and I looked at him and I knew his look was fiercer than mine so I dropped my gaze back to the file. The guys I represented were nice guys generally, respectful, funny, guys to hang around and drink beer with, nice guys except that by and large they were killers. I must admit it didn’t take much to be fiercer than me, but still my clients scared me. Which made my current position even more tenuous and doubtful. But still I had a job to do.
“It says here,” I said, looking through the file, “that the undercover cop you were buying the weapons from, this Detective Scarpatti, made tapes of certain of your conversations.” I looked back up at Cressi, hoping to see something. “Anything we should be worried about?”
“What, you shitting me? Of course we should be worried. They probably got me on tape making the whole deal with that scum-sucking slob.”
“I assumed that. What I mean is any surprises, any talk about what you were going to do with the weapons? Any plots against a government building in Oklahoma or specific crimes planned which might cause us any problems? We’re not looking at additional conspiracy charges, are we?”
“No, no way. Just the deal.”
“How much money are we talking about?”
“In general or specific terms do you want?”
“Always be specific, Pete.”
“Ninety-five thou, eight hundred and ten. Scarpatti figured it out with a calculator, the fat bastard. I had more than that when they busted me, you know, for incidentals. He told me cash only.”
“No Visa card I guess.”
“I’m already over my limit.”
“Guys like you and me, Pete, it’s congenital.”
He chuckled and bobbed and said, “What’s that, dirty or something?”