“That’s right. She was in that house being murdered with his drugs.”
“And that same night you also beat Mr. Goodwin to near death?”
No answer.
“With a chair, isn’t that right?”
Still no answer.
“Well, yes or no, Councilman?”
“It was self-defense.”
“Was it self-defense when you burned that crack house down?”
“I don’t know how it burned.”
“Was it self-defense that killed the two boys hiding in the attic of that house?”
“I don’t know how it burned.”
“Was it self-defense when you broke the jaw of the schoolboy who was courting your wife thirty years ago?”
The judge never let him answer that one, too much time had passed for it to remain a relevant incident, he said, but the question had done its work, all those questions had done their work, I hoped. So maybe Beth was right, maybe I had done what I needed to do. Because Jimmy Moore wasn’t my star witness and no matter how many times I asked if he had killed Bissonette only to have him deny it I had gotten from him what I really needed. He had shown himself to be a man whose passionate hatred for illegal drugs and their peddlers could cause him to fly into violent rages, a man who had beaten drug dealers with chairs, who had burned out crack houses no matter who was still inside, who had broken the jaw of a rival suitor while still in high school, in short a man who, with the right prodding, in the right situation, for the right reason, was capable of murder. All I had needed from Jimmy Moore was to set up the testimony of Veronica Ashland. It was up to Veronica to do the rest.
“You miss her,” said Beth, her fingers gently stroking my forehead, easing the surge of fear and anger at my own impotence that arose whenever I thought about what was happening at the trial. The smooth brush of her fingertips was drowsing and I didn’t hear what she said at first, so she repeated it. “You miss her.”
“Yes,” I said, and I did. It felt like there was a gap in my life, like something marvelous and strange had just up and disappeared. I wondered if this was what a dog felt after being fixed.
“How bad does it hurt?” she asked.
“Bad,” I said. “I don’t want to talk about it. How about you? Tell me about Alberto.” I rolled the “r” as I said the name.
“Alberto. Sweet Alberto. He is very handsome and very kind and his accent is wonderfully sexy. A prize, really.”
“And that is why you dumped him?”
“You’ve been listening to gossip,” she said. And then, after a pause, “I guess he was too happy, too contented. He accepted the world for what it was and accepted his place in it.”
“Suddenly I’m jealous,” I said. “That might just be the very recipe for happiness.”
“I’ve been with you too long, Victor, with your cynicism, your bitterness, your dissatisfaction. After my years with you, how could I ever bear the cheerful acceptance and bland optimism of the Albertos of the world?”
“Alone again, just the two of us,” I said, and then I joked, “It looks like we’re stuck with each other.”
She just stroked my hair and said nothing for a long while, so long a while that if it had been anyone other than my best friend Beth it would have been awkward. But it wasn’t awkward. She stroked my brow and eased me into a state just above sleep and the two of us remained like that for quite a while.
“It’s never going to happen, is it?” she said finally.
“I don’t think so,” I said.
“Why not, Victor?”
“It’s just not there. No matter how much we wish it were, it just isn’t. It would be too perfect anyway, too easy.”
“I could live with easy,” she said.
“Shhh. I am so tired.”
“I could damn well live with easy.”
“Shhh.” I closed my eyes and felt the softness of her fingers through my hair. “I need to sleep. Just a little nap. Shhh. We’ll talk later, later, I promise, but just let me sleep a little first.”
When I woke on my couch the next morning she was gone.
51
I ARRIVED AT THE COURTHOUSE late to find Judge Gimbel beet-red in anger at me. With the jury waiting in their stuffy little room he gave me a ten-minute lecture on the need for punctuality in the legal system, explaining in wildly mixed metaphors how any delay, like a falling domino, can upset the entire applecart of justice. He was going to hold me in contempt, he said, fine me for each minute I was late, and if it happened again, did I understand, I would land myself in jail, did I understand, as sure as I was standing there, did I understand.
I told him I understood.
And then, after pronouncing my sentence and the terms of my probation, he demanded an explanation for my inexcusable tardiness. Well, he told me, well, Mr. Carl, well, he told me, he was waiting.
“I was shot at this morning by an unknown assailant,” I told the judge.
That shut the gape in his great prune face.
“It was not the first time I had been shot at during the span of this trial, Your Honor. The police detained me for questioning, which is why I was delayed.”
So much for my contempt citation.
It again had happened outside my apartment. Two shots. One had spattered the edge of a concrete windowsill just by my head, sending shards spraying in a violent cloud of tiny, incising projectiles that cut a delicate red blossom into the skin around my left eye. The second shot had powered into my briefcase, reflexively jerked chest high after the first spray of cement. They had found the bullet lodged two-thirds of the way through my copy of the Federal Criminal Code and Rules.
Yes, the law had indeed saved my life.
After the second shot I dropped prone, more out of paralytic shock than any well-trained defensive instinct, and scooted, on forearms and shins, like a soldier scoots beneath barbed wire, scooted to the side of a parked car and rolled into the gutter between the car’s tires. I lay there, waiting, hoping that somebody had called the police, thinking of Chuckie Lamb bleeding to death in the rain in Washington Square.
Five minutes of waiting, five minutes that seemed like five years, five minutes until the police car came. Two officers picked me off the street and led me to the back seat of their car. I sat there, dazed and bleeding, behind the thick wire division, like a criminal, telling my story to the same young officer who had handled the shattered car window just a few weeks before. Whatever had happened, I knew it was beyond him.
“I want to talk to ADA Slocum,” I said.
“On a crime like this,” said the cop with an annoying condescension, “we don’t bring in the DA until we have a perpetrator.”
“I’m involved in a case he is investigating, Officer,” I leaned forward to read his badge. “Officer 3207. He’ll be very upset if you don’t get hold of him immediately.”
“We’ll see, sir.”
“I don’t want you to see, Officer 3207. I want you to do it this instant. Now. Or the commissioner will hear about it, I promise you.”
Slocum showed up ten minutes later.
“Oh man,” he said, opening the door and sitting beside me in the car. He was in his uniform, navy suit, red tie, rumpled tan raincoat with streaks of black newsprint on his sleeve, where his paper rubbed each morning. “How did I know that trouble was coming to you?”
“This is the second time,” I said.
“So I heard. Why didn’t you let me know about the first?”
“I thought it might have been just an accident.”
“Oh man, you are something,” said Slocum. “Whoever the shooter was, he got away again. Nothing left but two casings from a thirty-eight found across the street. We bagged them and we’ll check for prints, but don’t expect much.”
“What are you going to do?” I asked.
“Me, I’m going back to the office, do some work, maybe grab some lunch later, nothing special. But then nobody’s been shooting at me. The question, Carl, is what are you going to do?”