He rinsed off, stepped out of the shower and spent a lot of time shaving then getting his hair into shape. He dressed in a dark-green, short-sleeve knit shirt and the gray pants he always wore. Dungarees. He wondered why anybody would call pants anything that started in"dung." Shitarees, Craparees. He pulled on thin black nylon socks, sheer like women's stockings, then strapped on black sandals.
He stepped out of the bathroom, which was filled with steam and hair spray mist, and smelled the food, which was resting on the TV. The woman was sitting at the chipped desk putting on her makeup. For a minute, looking at her buoyant breasts in the tight yellow sweater, Nestor's hunger for food wavered, but then the McMuffins won and he sat on the bed to eat.
He ate the first one quickly and then, with the edge off his appetite, lay back on the bed to read the paper and sip his coffee while he worked on the second one. He noticed she'd bought some insurance; a third McMuffin was also in the bag – to keep his appetites and his hands occupied. He laughed but she pretended she didn't know he'd caught on.
He'd gotten halfway through the front section of theMiami Herald, reading the national news, when he sat upright in bed. "Oh, shit."
She was curling her eyelashes. "Huh?"
But Nestor was standing up, walking to his dresser, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. He pulled out a jumble of underwear and socks and knit shirts.
"Hey, iron these for me?" He handed her the shirts.
"Jacky, what is it?"
"Just get the iron out, okay?"
She did and spread a thin towel on the desk for an ironing board. She ironed each shirt, then folded it precisely.
"Whatsa matter?"
"I've got to go away for a little while."
"Yeah, where you going? Can I come too?"
" New York."
"Oh, Jacky, I've never been-"
"Forget about it. This's business."
She handed him the shirts then snorted. "What business? You got no business."
"I got a business. I just never told you about it."
"Yeah, so what do you do?"
Nestor began to pack a suitcase. "I'll be back in a week or two." He hesitated then took out his wallet and handed her two hundred and ten dollars. "I'm not back then pay Seppie for the room for next couple weeks, okay?"
"Sure, I'll do that."
He looked at the dresser again then said to her, "Hey, check in the bathroom, see if I left my razor?"
She did this and when she wasn't looking Nestor reached way back into the bottom drawer of the dresser and took out a dark-blue Steyr GB 9mm pistol and two full clips of bullets. He slipped these into his bag. Then he said, "Hey, never mind, I found it. I packed it already."
She came up to him. "You gonna miss me?"
He picked up the paper and tore out the story. He read it again. She came up and read over his shoulder. "What that about? Somebody getting some guy outta jail in New York?"
He looked at her with irritation and put the scrap in his wallet.
She said, "Who is that guy, Randy Boggs?"
Nestor smiled in an unamused way and kissed her on the mouth. Then he said, "I'll call you." He picked up the bag and walked outside into the blast of humid heat, glancing at a tiny chameleon sitting motionless in a band of shade on the peeling banister.
7
If he didn't do this crime he didsomething.'" The man's voice went high at the end of the sentence and threatened to break apart. He was in his late forties, so skinny that his worn cowhide belt made pleats in slacks that were supposed to be straight-cut.
"And if he didsomething the jury says, 'What the hell, let's convict him ofthis.'"
Rune nodded at the taut words.
Randy Boggs's lawyer sat at his desk, which was piled high – yellow sheets, court briefs, Redweld folders, letters, photographs of crime scenes, an empty yogurt carton crusty on the rim, a dozen cans of Diet Pepsi, a shoe box (she wondered if it contained a Mafia client's fee). The office was near Broadway on Maiden Lane in lower Manhattan, where the streets were grimy, dark, crowded. Inside, the building was a network of dirty, green corridors.
The office of Frederick T. Megler, J.D., P.C., was at the end of a particularly dirty and particularly green corridor.
He sat back in his old leather chair. His face was gray and mottled and would make occasional forays into exaggerated expressions (wonder, hatred, surprise) then snap back into its waiting state of innocent incredulity, punctuated with a breathy, nasal snort.
"That's what I have to deal with." The bony fingers of his right hand made a circuit of the air as he explained the judicial system in New York to Rune. "The way the system works…" He looked at Rune and his voice rose in volume for emphasis. "The way the system works is that the jury canonly convict you for the crime for which you've been accused. They can't convict you because you're an asshole or because of the three guys you wasted last year or because of the old lady you'regoing to mug tomorrow for her social security check. Just for the particular crime."
"Got it," Rune said.
Megler's other set of bony fingers joined in. They pointed at her. "You get things like this true story. My client's arrested for killing some poor son of a bitch. An ADA – assistant district attorney – bless her young, virginal soul, brings him up on four counts. Murder two, manslaughter one and two, criminally negligent homicide. Those last three counts are what they call lesser-included offenses. They're easier to prove. If you can't get a conviction on murder – which is hard to prove to the jury – maybe you can get the manslaughter. If you can't get that maybe you'll get criminally negligent homicide. Okay? So. My client – who's got a rap sheet a mile long – had a grudge against the victim. When the cops arrested him based on an informer, he was in a bar in Times Square, where four witnesses swore he'd been drinking for the past five hours. The victim was killed two hours before. Shot five times in the head at close range. No murder weapon."
"So your client had a perfect alibi," Rune said. "And no gun."
"Exactly." The voice dipped from its screech and sounded earnest. "I grill the informant in court and by the time I'm through his story's as riddled as the vic's forehead, okay? But what happens? The juryconvicts my guy. Not of murder, which is what they should've done if they believed the informant, but of criminally negligent homicide. Which is total bullshit. You don'tnegligently shoot five bullets into somebody's head. Either you don't believe the alibi and convict him of murder or you let him off completely. The chickenshit jury didn't have the balls to get him on murder but they couldn't let him walk because he's a black kid from the Bronx who had a record and'd said on a number of occasions he wanted to cut the vic's spleen out of his body."
Rune sat forward in her chair. "See, that's just what I'm doing my story on – an innocent man got convicted."
"Whoa, honey, who said my client was innocent?"
She blinked and went through the facts for a moment. "I thoughtyou did. What about the gun, what about the alibi?"
"Naw, he killed the vic, ditched the gun, then paid four buddies a couple six-packs of crack to perjure themselves…"
"But-"
"But the point is not is he guilty? The point is you gotta play by the rules. And the jury didn't. You can only convict on the evidence that was presented. The jury didn't do that."
"What's so wrong with that? He was guilty and the jury convicted him. That sounds okay to me."
"Let's change the facts a little. Let's pretend that young black Fred Williams, National Merit Scholar with a ticket to Harvard Medical School, who all he's ever done bad is get a parking ticket, is walking down a Hundred and Thirty-fifth Street when two of New York's finest screech up behind him, get him in a choke hold then drag him to the precinct and book him for rape. He gets picked out of a lineup because they all look alike, et cetera, and the case goes to trial. There the DA describes to a predominantly Caucasian middle-class jury how this kid beat, raped and sodomized a mother of two.