“There is no mob. It is a figment of the press’s imagination.”
“Then what was he going to do with all those guns?”
“That’s the question, isn’t it?”
“I had heard you were a mob lawyer. It’s true, isn’t it?”
I made an effort to stare at her without blinking as I let the comment slide off me like a glob of phlegm.
Yes, a majority of my clients just happened to be junior associates of Mr. Raffaello, like I said, but I was no house counsel, no mob lawyer. At least not technically. I merely handled their cases after they allegedly committed their alleged crimes, nothing more. And though my clients never flipped, never ratted out the organization that fed them since they were pups, that sustained them, that took care of their families and their futures, though my clients never informed on the family, the decision not to inform was made well before they ever stepped into my office. And was I really representing these men, or was I instead enforcing the promises made to all citizens in the Constitution of the United States? Wasn’t I among the noblest defenders of those sacred rights for which our forefathers fought and died? Who among us was doing more to protect liberty, to ensure justice? Who among us was doing more to safeguard the American way of life?
Do I sound defensive?
I was about to explain it all to her but it bored even me by then so all I said was, “I do criminal law. I don’t get involved in…”
“What’s that?” she shouted as she leaped to kneeling on her seat. “What is it? What?”
I stared for a moment into her anxious face, filled with a true terror, before I looked under the table at where her legs had been only an instant before. A cat, brown and ruffled, was rubbing its back on the legs of her chair. It looked quite contented as it rubbed.
“It’s just a cat,” I said.
“Get rid of it.”
“It’s just a cat,” I repeated.
“I hate them, miserable ungrateful little manipulators, with their claws and their teeth and their fur-licking tongues. They eat human flesh, do you know that? It’s one of their favorite things. Faint near a cat and it’ll chew your face off.”
“I don’t think so.”
“Get rid of it, please please please.”
I reached under the table and the cat scurried away from my grasp. I stood up and went after it, herding it to the back of the coffee shop where, behind the bookshelves, was an open bathroom door. When the cat slipped into the bathroom I closed the door behind it.
“What was that all about?” I asked Caroline when I returned to the table.
“I don’t like cats,” she said as she fiddled with her cigarette.
“I don’t especially like cats either, but I don’t jump on my seat and go ballistic when I see one.”
“I have a little problem with them, that’s all.”
“With cats?”
“I’m afraid of cats. I’m not the only one. It has a name. Ailurophobia. So what? We’re all afraid of something.”
I thought on that a bit. She was right of course, we were all afraid of something, and in the scheme of things being afraid of cats was not the worst of fears. My great fear in this life didn’t have a name that I knew of. I was afraid of remaining exactly who I was, and that phobia instilled a shiver of fear into every one of my days. Something as simple as a fear of cats would have been a blessing.
“All right, Caroline,” I said. “Tell me about your sister.”
She took a drag from her cigarette and exhaled in a long white stream. “Well, for one thing, she was murdered.”
“Have the police found the killer?”
She reached for her pack of Camel Lights even though the cigarette she had was still lit. “Jackie was hanging from the end of a rope in her apartment. They’ve concluded that she hung herself.”
“The police said that?”
“That’s right. The coroner and some troglodyte detective named McDeiss. They closed the case, said it was a suicide. But she didn’t.”
“Hang herself?”
“She wouldn’t.”
“Detective McDeiss ruled it a suicide?”
She sighed. “You don’t believe me either.”
“No, actually,” I said. “I’ve had a few run-ins with McDeiss but he’s a pretty good cop. If he said it was a suicide, it’s a fair bet your sister killed herself. You may not have thought she was suicidal, that’s perfectly natural, but…”
“Of course she was suicidal,” she said, interrupting me once again. “Jackie read Sylvia Plath as if her poetry were some sort of a road map through adolescence. One of her favorite lines was from a poem called ‘Lady Lazarus.’ ‘Dying is an art, like everything else. I do it exceptionally well.’ ”
“Then I don’t understand your problem.”
“Jackie talked of suicide as naturally as others talked of the weather, but she said she’d never hang herself. She was disgusted by the idea of dangling there, aware of the pain, turning as the rope tightened and creaked, the pressure on your neck, on your backbone, hanging there until they cut you down.”
“What would have been her way?”
“Pills. Darvon. Two thousand milligrams is fatal. She always had six thousand on hand. Jackie used to joke that she wanted to be prepared if ever a really terrific suicidal urge came along. Besides, in her last couple years she almost seemed happy. It was like she was actually finding the peacefulness she once thought was only for her in death through this New Age church she had joined, finding it through meditation. She had even gotten herself engaged, to an idiot, yes, but still engaged.”
“So let’s say she was murdered. What do you want me to do about it?”
“Find out who did it.”
“I’m just a lawyer,” I said. “What you’re looking for is a private investigator. Now I have one that I use who is terrific. His name is Morris Kapustin and he’s a bit unorthodox, but if anyone can help he can. I can set…”
“I don’t want him, I want you.”
“Why me?”
“What exactly do mob lawyers do, anyway, eat in Italian restaurants and plot?”
“Why me, Caroline?” I stared at her and waited.
She lit her new cigarette from the still-glowing butt of her old one and then crushed the old against the edge of the mug. “Do you think I smoke too much? Everybody thinks I smoke too much. I used to be cool, now it’s like I’m a leper. Old ladies stop me in the street and lecture.”
I just stared at her and waited some more and after all the waiting she took a deep drag from her cigarette, exhaled, and said:
“I think a bookie named Jimmy Vigs killed her.”
So that was it, why she had chased me, insignificant me, down the street and pulled a gun and collapsed to the cement in black tears, all of which was perfectly designed to gain my attention, if not my sympathy. I knew Jimmy Vigs Dubinsky, sure I did. I had represented him on his last bookmaking charge and gotten him an acquittal too, when I denied he was a gambler, denied it was his ledger that the cops had found, denied it was his handwriting in the ledger despite what the experts said because wink-wink what do experts know, denied the notes in the ledger referred to bets on football games, denied the units mentioned in the ledger notes referred to dollar amounts, and then, after all those sweet denials, I had opened my arms and said with my best boys-will-be-boys voice, “And where’s the harm?” It helped that the jury was all men, after I had booted all the women, and that the trial was held in the spring, smack in the middle of March madness, when every one of those men had money in an NCAA pool. So, yes, I knew Jimmy Vigs Dubinsky.
“He’s a sometime client, as you obviously know,” I said, “so I really don’t want to hear anymore. But what I can tell you about Jim Dubinsky is that he’s not a killer. I’ve known him for…”
“Then you can clear him.”
“Will you stop interrupting me? It’s rude and annoying.”
She tilted her head at me and smiled, as if provoking me was her intent.