“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?”
“I’ve got to get to court.”
“Slow down. You hate to keep Gimbel waiting, sure. But nothing will screw his calendar like the automatic mistrial because you turn up dead. So tell me who might possibly want to kill Victor Carl.”
“They should be taking tickets. Now serving number twenty-six.”
“What about your pal Raffaello?”
I shook my head. “The one guy with no reason, yet,” I said, though he might just decide there was reason enough if I didn’t find out where his money went. “Besides,” I continued, “I asked him about the first shot. He said if he wanted me dead I would have been dead. But Jimmy Moore, I think, would like me to disappear.”
“I don’t doubt it, with the way you went after him yesterday.”
I lit up for a second. “You liked that?”
“Not bad.”
“And then there’s Norvel Goodwin.”
Slocum let out a low whistle. “See, I knew something was up when you started asking about him.”
“He took me for a ride, told me he had an interest in this case and to back off. When I didn’t he left a dachshund with his neck snapped and his belly split on my doorstep.”
“He seems to have a thing for dead animals. Something from his childhood, I guess. But what interest could he have in this case?”
I shrugged.
“Anyone else might want to take a shot at you?” he asked.
“Well, my ex-partner and I are feuding. He’s a murderous fuck.”
“Ex-partners are like that.”
“And of course I owe some money to MasterCard.”
“They can be brutal, I know.”
“I have to get to court.”
“Sure you do,” he said. “I’ll tell the unit to stick around while you put on a clean suit. You have a clean suit, I hope.”
“I never needed more than one before.”
“They’ll escort you to the courthouse. If you need them again on your way home, let me know. I’ll take care of it.”
I nodded at him.
“But before you go,” he said. “I’ve been assigned to the Chuckie Lamb killing. You know anything about that?”
“No,” I said, “not a thing.”
“Because there’s something peculiar. I was listening to the 911 tape and the guy who called the murder in, he sounded a lot like you.”
“Strange coincidence,” I said.
“And a witness spotted a man in a raincoat, about your height and build, running out of Washington Square just before the call.”
“Looks like you got your work cut out for you.”