Rough Justice (7 page)

Then she remembered Steere’s medical records, a joint exhibit of a hospital report. Steere had been taken to the hospital after the carjacking and an ER surgeon had stitched the slash under his eye. Another doctor had given him an eye test and noted that his vision was blurry. But Judy was thinking of the note in the medical records,
Dichromatism
. Color blindness. She had asked Steere about it later, and he’d said he was color blind and couldn’t distinguish between red and green. Judy had wondered how he drove a car, but figured he knew which light was on top. Everybody knew that. Red on the top.

Wait a minute. Judy watched the traffic light under the bridge blink from red to green, sideways. How did Steere know the traffic light had turned red if the panel was mounted horizontally? There was no reason or logic to red being on the left. It could just as easily have been the other way around. There was no way to know, if you were color blind. Even if Steere did know it, he hadn’t mentioned it in any of his interviews and he had been questioned in depth about the details.

Judy’s heartbeat quickened. If Steere couldn’t tell whether the traffic light was red, why did he stop, especially in this rough neighborhood? If you weren’t sure a light was red or green and there was no traffic, wouldn’t you go anyway? Was there something fishy about Steere’s story? Had he meant to kill the man? Was this what the D.A. had learned?

Judy turned and hurried back to her skis. She wanted to talk to Mary about it before Erect got back. She pressed her boots into her ski bindings, slipped her hands into her pole straps, and took off for the office. It was almost dark and the snow showed no signs of letting up.

Judy skiied through the snowstorm, her eyes drawn to every light on the route back. Flurries swirled around traffic lights in whorls of red and eddies of green. Flakes swooped in fanciful halos around the white streetlights, standing out like impastoed brushstrokes against the night sky. The scene reminded Judy of
The Starry Night
, then of Van Gogh himself, and she found herself wondering how someone who appeared completely normal could, in reality, be utterly, truly, insane.

M
ary DiNunzio slumped in front of the computer in her office and stared guiltily out the window at the falling snow. It was dark, and her best friend was out in a blizzard in the worst part of town because of her. The radio on Mary’s desk reported that the temperature had dipped to five degrees, which felt like minus thirty with the wind chill. She snapped off the radio and pressed Judy to the back of her mind, but still couldn’t concentrate.

Where was Marta? How much time was left? She glanced at her clock, a fake Waterford her parents had given her. 6:05. Shit. She had to keep working to have an answer on time. Marta had assigned Mary to read all the statements Steere made to the police and the press to see if there were any inconsistencies in his story. It was a stupid assignment, and Mary was having predictably lousy luck so far. She’d already read through the file, but it was completely consistent. Discouraged, Mary took a gulp of coffee from a mug that read
FEMINAZI
. At Rosato & Associates, even the dishware was political.

1955 of 2014 articles,
said the computer.

Mary’s brain buzzed with the caffeine. She used to drink a lot of coffee at Stalling, but at Rosato, coffee was a cult thing, with Bennie as Our Lady of the Natural Filters. Bennie’s latest crusade was that the coffee wasn’t hot enough, so she was actually perking the stuff on the electric stove in old-fashioned tin pots, like Mary’s parents did. Mary sipped the scorching brew, winced in pain, and hit the
ENTER
key.

ELLIOT STEERE CHARGED WITH MURDER, read the headline, reduced to computer-byte size rather than tabloid screamer. Mary skimmed the first paragraph. The Philly newspapers, online at their own snazzy web site, had bitched about Elliot Steere since his rise in real estate development. Mary scrolled backward in time.

TRIUMPH BUILDING A LOSS, said a subhead, and the reporter detailed how Steere had bought the 100,000-square-foot building in 1975, a year after it was designated historic, with the stated intention of restoring it for condos. But the renovations never happened and Steere fell behind on the maintenance. Every year, Licenses & Inspections fired off a packet of citations for code violations, like a volley of blanks. Steere defended with lawsuits that tied the property up in litigation. In the meantime, the historic building crumbled. The story was repeated throughout the blocks of the city.

Mary sipped scalding coffee as she read. The article contained a litany of complaints against Steere. The preservationists and Chamber of Commerce vilified him. Nobody was more vocal than the mayor of Philadelphia, Peter Montgomery Walker.

“Elliot Steere is bringing down this city to his level,” said Mayor Pete Walker in an exclusive interview with this reporter. “Frankly, by that I mean the gutter.”
According to the mayor’s chief of staff, Jennifer Pressman, Mr. Steere presently owns 150 parcels in Center City, 82 of which have current fire and building code violations. In addition to his Center City properties, Mr. Steere is reputed to own hundreds of rowhomes in the city’s outlying neighborhoods, with deeds recorded through a complex series of holding companies. Ms. Pressman said that the Mayor’s Office is currently spearheading a review of these holdings.

Mary’s conscience nagged at her. She was born and raised in Philly and was a huge fan of the mayor’s. He’d managed to turn the city around and had plans to go further. The newspapers called it the “Philadelphia Renaissance,” and it included a huge advertising budget to attract tourists, an Avenue of the Arts project that would build museums, a concert hall, theaters, and an entertainment complex on the Delaware River. The jewel in the crown was to be the newly developed historic district:

The city has launched a campaign to enliven the mile-square historic district, including a $20 million Visitors Center called Independence National Historical Park, to be built adjacent to Independence Hall and the Liberty Bell, as well as the nearby Colonialera neighborhoods of Old City and Society Hill. Plans include the building of a Constitution Center on the mall adjacent to the United States Courthouse, unifying the area, according to Ms. Pressman.

All of these plans depended on the appearance of downtown Philly, which was unfortunately influenced to a large degree by Elliot Steere, who refused to repair his vast number of buildings. Why? Steere would waste his properties until the city paid his price to reclaim and restore them. He knew how critical his holdings were to the mayor’s plans and he wouldn’t sell until the price peaked.

Mary felt a second wave of guilt. Her hometown was trying to make a comeback and Steere was blackmailing it. Almost single-handedly obstructing the city’s turnaround and, as a result, torpedoing the mayor’s reelection. Mary bit her lip. She’d hoped she’d be working for the good guys when she joined Rosato. Hellfire licked at her pumps.

But Mary had to get to Steere’s quotes if she was going to have an answer for Marta. She scrolled backward, going deeper into the online archives. She was praying Steere had said something to the media in the early stages of the investigation. God knows, he gave tons of interviews. She sighed and returned to the zillionth article.

“I am absolutely innocent of any and all crimes charged,” Steere told reporters. “It’s a sad day when a man can’t defend his own life without being harassed for it. This is a political prosecution. You know it and I know it.”
“Mr. Steere has no further comment,” interrupted his attorney, nationally known criminal defense lawyer Marta Richter. “That’s all for now, everybody.”
Members of the National Rifle Association protested Mr. Steere’s arraignment by picketing in front of the Criminal Justice Center. Their spokesman Jim Alonso said, “We represent every decent American’s right to defend his life and property.”

A photo under the story showed Marta standing in front of twenty-odd microphones with a determined group of NRA types arranged decoratively in white T-shirts behind her. Each T-shirt had a red bull’s-eye on the front and read
PROTECTED BY SMITH & WESSON
. Marta had orchestrated the demonstration but she couldn’t convince the NRA guys to lose the T-shirts. Mary sipped her coffee, finally cooling. When would she work for the good guys? Or at least Democrats.

Mary hit a key for the next article, read more quotes by Steere, then kept at it, article after article. She checked the clock. 6:15. Mary kept scrolling and reading, her heart sinking. She wasn’t finding anything and it was getting later. Her head began to thud, a caffeine hangover. Still she kept reading, skimming each article until the boldfaced Steere.

6:31. Almost 7:00, and Mary still had no answer. She paused, rethinking the problem. Maybe she was using the wrong search. She’d been researching articles that contained the name Steere and was getting a civics lesson. Maybe she needed to approach it from a different direction. She tried to formulate a new search request, her eyes scanning her office for inspiration.

The office was small, tidy, and efficient. An antique quilt hung on the wall next to framed diplomas from Penn undergrad and law school and some honors certificates. There were two simple chairs opposite a pine farm table she used as a desk; her law books stood upright as altar boys on wall-mounted wooden shelves. Mary had decorated her office to inspire confidence in her clients while not offending corporate sensibilities. It was designed to make no statement but “
HIRE ME PLEASE, YOU COULD DO A LOT WORSE
.” Which was precisely what Mary thought of her legal abilities.

Mary’s gaze fell on her desk, atypically cluttered with papers from the Steere case, which had taken over her office the way it had taken over her life. She hated the case. A carjacking ending in death. Knives. Guns. Awful. Mary remembered the police photos with nausea and it hurt to look at the autopsy photos. Mary had seen too much death; her husband, and later. The Steere case wasn’t helping to leave those memories behind. The next person who said “healing process” to her was getting a fat lip.

She stared at the Steere file and flashed on the photo of the dead homeless man, crumpled on the street in the fetal position. His eyes were open in death, his mouth an agonized black hole in a dense beard. Wild cords of his hair were soaked with blood. He wore baggy pants and no shirt. He’d had no ID or last known address, no friends or relations. The police had learned his name from the neighbors who lived near the Twenty-fifth Street Bridge.

His name was Heb Darnton. Mary had done the factual investigation on him and had interviewed the neighbors. They’d told her Darnton lived under the bridge, drunk most of the time. He used to shout at the passing cars but nobody thought he’d do any harm. The black community rose up at Steere’s killing him. They demanded that Steere be charged with murder and demonstrated at the Criminal Justice Center, an inner-city counterpoint to the white suburban NRA members. Police with riot gear and German shepherds had to be called to keep order; for the cops and the press, the victim’s identity became a detail as man morphed into symbol. Heb Darnton was forgotten in the fracas, but Mary never forgot a victim and never would. Because once upon a time the victim had been someone she loved.

The victim. Maybe that was it. Mary deleted the old search, typed in
DARNTON
, and hit
GO
.

Your search has found 2238 articles, reported the computer.

Ugh, no. She read the first couple, skimming for information about Darnton. The homeless man was mentioned only as Steere’s victim. She read the next five articles. Nothing. She narrowed the search and put in Heb Darnton.

Your search has found 1981 articles,
it said.

Mary skimmed the first few. They were the same as in the earlier search, but included Darnton’s first name. Her brain was too tired to think and she drained her mug. She’d run out of gas. Christ. What kind of a name was Heb anyway? A nickname? She took a flyer, typed in
HEB
, and waited while the hard disk ground away. Then she caught the typo in the search request.

EB
.

Damn it! Mary never could type. She’d tried to teach herself on that Mavis Beacon program, with no luck. She bought the software because she liked the pretty, entrepreneurial Mavis on the box cover and wanted to support her efforts. But Mary couldn’t find the time to cyberpractice and then she found out Mavis wasn’t even a real businesswoman, just a model. It was disillusioning.

Your search has found 23 articles.

Mary was about to delete the search request when her gaze slipped to the first article, about a farmer in Lancaster County outside of Philly, an Amish man named Eb Stoltzfus. Eb and his friends were reportedly having problems with corn borers. Real helpful. Mary thought a minute. Eb. Ebenezer. She clicked to the next article. Sure enough.

“ ‘Ebenezer Squeezer’ was my favorite song,” said Jillian Cohen, a second grader at Gladwyne Elementary School. “I liked it the best in the whole recital.”

Mary jolted to alertness. Eb, not Heb? Ebenezer Darnton. Maybe that was the real name of the homeless man. The only way anyone knew his name was that he had told it to the neighbors. Maybe the neighbors were hearing Heb but he was saying Eb. The cops had followed their procedures for identifying him, but Mary had been more thorough herself in her neighborhood survey. She searched
EBENEZER DARNTON
and pressed
GO
!

Your search has found no articles.

Shit. It was 6:50. Maybe Marta would be late. Maybe Marta would die. Think, girl. If the search is too narrow, broaden the time. Mary hit a key to search all archives from 1950 to present.

Your search has found no articles.