Absent Friends (9 page)

“You've got to understand, firefighters are big heroes now, not just here but all over the country,” FDNY Deputy Assistant Chief Gino Aiello told the
Tribune.
Aiello was promoted last week in the Fire Department's effort to replace high-ranking officers lost on September 11. “Schoolkids are sending us pennies. But that could turn around. You saw what happened last week.” This was a reference to the October 25 melee at Ground Zero, when firefighters, protesting the Mayor's order to cut the number searching for remains, clashed with police officers. Seventeen firefighters were arrested and charged with disorderly conduct.

“Look, no one believes every man or woman in this Department is pure as the driven snow,” said one Fire Department source, asking to remain anonymous. “But McCaffery was famous. Long before 9/11, people heard of him, he was a hero. Since they set up the Fund, he stands for the Department in a lot of people's minds. If it turns out he was mixed up in anything, that could hurt us. It could hurt a lot of the positive things going on.”

“September 11, we lost 343 guys,” Chief Aiello told the
Tribune.
“But also 92 vehicles. Equipment—radios, oxygen tanks, all sorts of things. Right now a lot of guys are putting in tremendous overtime in the search. That's all got to come out of the budget somewhere. The McCaffery Fund could be a big help, but not if it blows up in our faces.”

The investigation is continuing.

P
HIL
'
S
S
TORY

Chapter 2

How to Find the Floor

October 31, 2001

It was going to be a busy day.

Halloween. In his field, they used to joke it should be a national holiday. This year made-up horrors were redundant. Not a lot of Freddie or Jason masks around this year.

And all days were busy, now as before. Phone service still spotty, even the cell phones went in and out. Some offices, courtrooms, chambers still closed, judges and ADAs needing to be hunted down and mostly on foot because of the damn phones. The building where Phil had his office had reopened, but it was inside the perimeter, making many people vastly confused about whether they were allowed to go there, and if so, how.

You might have thought, given the staggering nature, the breathtaking scale, of the crime of September 11, that criminals of lesser ambition, weaker imagination, would have paused in their pursuits, even if only from embarrassment. And for the first week or so, they had. A week when the muggers, stickup artists, con men, drug dealers, and gangbangers gave New York's stunned citizens and exhausted cops breathing room.

Then the Mayor—in the New Normal, everyone's hero, which, according to Phil, showed you how far this really was from normal—the Mayor told New Yorkers to do their patriotic duty: live their lives, get back to work.

And the city found out that crooks were as patriotic as anyone else.

For Phil, that meant new clients, new interviews, and new bullshit stories to get past:
I can't help you if you're going to jerk me around.
And the old clients still needed him to stand up with them at their arraignments, their bail hearings, their days in court.

The
Tribune
story hadn't changed this, not yet. The people Phil defended were criminals. (Aloud, Phil would have insisted on “persons charged with criminal activity.”) If the odor of improper, possibly illegal, behavior swirled around their lawyer, in their minds that only made him more likely to understand. Those of his clients who even knew, who even read the papers. Most of them were hypnotized by their own troubles. Their minds were locked on the desolation of the futures they faced the way you'd stare into a bloodred sunrise, unable to take your eyes off the storm clouds massing.

So until it came to the ethics investigation, the disciplinary committee review—and it would, oh yes; already there were conversations that stopped when he walked into a room, invitations to go get a beer that he didn't have to duck because they'd stopped coming—Phil could stay busy. His clients, as before, would be desperately glad to see him, though what he was able to offer them was, compared to their hopes, a leaf in a windstorm. Until the Feds called, or the State, whichever won the fight over who got to try to take Phil Constantine down—and they would have called already, if everyone on that side wasn't scrambling, madly searching tips and phone taps they'd ignored for years to see if they should have seen this coming, if they could see anything else coming now—Phil's life could go on, no different and completely changed, like everything else.

And if he found himself now, on occasion and without warning, seized with an urge to grab a client's collar and shout, “That's it? After all this, this is still who you are and what you want?” he roped himself back under control each time, and just went on. He wasn't really sure who it was that he wanted to shout at.

Phil had been caught in the cloud on September 11, running like hell with everyone else.

His eyes burned, his lungs were crazy for air. A woman next to him staggered, so he reached for her, caught her, forced her to keep going, warm blood seeping onto his arm from a slash down her back as he pulled her along, later carried her. Somewhere, someone in a uniform took her from him, bore her off someplace while someone else pressed an oxygen mask to his face. He breathed and breathed, and when he could speak, he asked about the woman, but no one knew.

And all the time he was running, coughing and choking and seeing nothing but thick dust, no sense of direction, no up or down, all the time he was hearing screams and sirens and shouts, a clanging like a thousand railroad cars crashing off the tracks, and, in all that, explosions like gunfire that were bodies and parts of bodies hitting the ground, all that time, in Phil's mind, were his clients: skinny little José, down two strikes but he just had to try to peddle that one last goddamn bag of grass, though Phil had warned him, warned him; Mrs. Johnson, whose five children still hadn't been told she'd shot her husband's girlfriend and then her husband; that kid he called Ben, though the kid had given four different names already. Phil saw them all, locked in cells down here, in the middle of this swirling, roaring ruin and death, knowing they were trapped, knowing they would die.

They didn't. The towers fell in, not over; the devastation, as bad as it was, was not as bad as it could have been. Acknowledging this truth, as Phil did later, did not make him share the Pollyanna optimism of the friend who had voiced it. As far as Phil knew, it was always true. Nothing was ever as bad as it could have been.

And damn little was as good, either.

So the day would be busy, and complicated in ways Phil wasn't sure about yet by the death of that bastard Harry Randall. He needed to call Sally and Kevin; probably he should've called Sally last night, when he heard. Well, not probably: should have and didn't. What reason? Choose one.

Although the biggest reason might be this, the thought he'd had last night, when, walking home from Battery Park, he'd thought about what Randall's death could mean:
This could be my chance.
Breathing space, room to maneuver.

Because some of what Randall had said in the
Tribune
stories was true.

And most of what he'd implied was a crock.

But about a lot of it, Phil didn't know.

Now that Randall was no longer clawing through their lives, drawing blood from anything that came near him, now maybe Phil could take a shot at finding the truth.

Why?

Not because it would prove his innocence, show him to be the falsely accused white knight. Far too late for that. If the truth showed that nothing Phil had done was illegal, he still wasn't innocent, no.

And not because the truth would give him ammunition. If the truth was good, he might win; if bad, he'd certainly lose. How many times, over the years, had he told that to clients who wanted to go to trial instead of taking the plea, who wanted to offer up the truth to a jury? As though truth weren't a prisoner of the ways people find to use it, just like everything else.

Markie Keegan had been the last client Phil had considered trying to talk out of pleading. Markie, Phil had been sure, could have persuaded a jury with the truth.

No, that was wrong: he had not been sure. Markie had sat on the other side of the visiting room table before he made bail and listened. He'd held his son on his lap at his own kitchen table after his family, his friends, his boss, and his church had pooled what they had to get him released, and he'd heard Phil out.

And he'd said, No, no trial. I'll take the plea.

And Phil had felt relieved.

The truth, Phil had come to understand through the years since, through the trials and the pleas, the investigations, the accusations, and the stories, rarely did anybody any good.

But in those years the walls and floors of the world were solid, not blasting air and dust and choking smoke.

Now he was thinking this: what he'd been part of all these years, what Jimmy McCaffery had led him into, Phil had always thought he'd known. What he'd thought was bad. But if Randall was right, the truth was worse.

Now, because he could grasp, hold, be sure of, nothing else, he wanted to find that truth. Just to have it? No.

To offer it to Sally. To show her, to make her know that in this new world where, suddenly, none of them were sure of anything, some truths could still prove others, and this one would prove that he loved her.

He needed to find this truth, for its use.

But that was for later. Right now,
now,
seven
A.M.
on another beautiful New York morning, Phil left the locker room, heart beginning to speed, and shoved through the swinging doors onto the basketball court.

The others, these people he'd been playing with twice a week for six, eight years, these teammates he rarely saw anywhere but in this gym, were already here, stretching or shooting around. They had an unwritten rule, no serious action before seven, and another, no one arriving after seven had any claim to play.

“Oh, look, it's Phil, must be ten seconds to!” This the usual needle—Phil was never late, but rarely early, for anything—from one of the three women regulars, the wiseass one. Jane, her name was, a doctor, short but quick, good D, usually played point, and she could shoot, but only from outside. That was the book on her. Phil had a book on everyone, play with him twice and he had your game in his head.

He did a couple of quick stretches, counted players. Last to come, he made ten. Shorthanded, they'd have played four on four; that was sometimes even better, if you asked Phil. The advantage: in an undermanned game, every player had to work harder.

And Phil liked hard work, especially when it accomplished something you could see.

But no one had to ask Phil how he liked to attack the game. You could see it in his grin, his glittering eagle's eyes. Those eyes were part of his teammates' book on him. Everyone else's game face was seriousness, grim determination, an intimidating glower: Phil Constantine's was shining eyes and a sharp, hungry smile. People playing with him for the first time might take this to mean that he cared less than they did about each play, about the final score.

Prosecutors sometimes made that same mistake in court.

His teammates grinned and greeted him. They had to be thinking about the
Tribune
story, they had to be wondering; Phil knew it. But here at the Y, as long as his shot was on, he was welcome; and if he was Mother Teresa but missed his layups, the trash talk would erupt.

Phil finished stretching, looked around, saw Jane squaring up for a shot. He barreled from behind and stole the ball. Cursing, she raced after him, jumped to block his fadeaway. She fouled him, but the shot was good. Brian hollered, “This a grudge match, or can anyone play?” Phil fired him the ball. Early morning sunlight filtered through the Y's high, dusty windows; they sorted themselves into teams, and leaving behind what had happened, what would happen, they started to play.

L
AURA
'
S
S
TORY

Chapter 3

Complicated Work

October 31, 2001

Laura came back early in the morning, looking for Leo.

It was Halloween, but that meant nothing to a reporter. (Christmas, Easter Sunday, their mother's birthdays meant nothing to reporters chasing news.) Some years the newsroom sprouted pumpkins and black- cat cutouts on Halloween, but this year what could be more frightening than the view out the window?

Reporters, chomping on bagels and slurping coffee, glanced up as Laura walked by. Some tried to speak to her, to say something kind. Laura nodded to each, didn't stop on her way to her desk. Seated, she fixed her eyes on the glow of her monitor as though she were waiting for something. She wrenched the lid from a coffee cup and gulped at it without tasting it at all. Her comforters retreated.

She stayed at her computer, waiting, tearing through e-mails, not understanding their messages or caring that she didn't, until finally Leo surged from the elevator and sliced through the newsroom like Sherman on his way to the sea. She watched him through the glass of his office like a sharpshooter while he dropped his briefcase, switched on his computer, pulled his fried egg sandwich and coffee from the deli bag. Then she rose and went to his door.

His eyes, colorless as tin, rested on her before he spoke. This was unlike Leo. “Stone.” He pointed at a chair. Given permission, she sat. Steam from Leo's coffee cup slipped into the air as though hoping to sneak away before Leo noticed.

Laura said, “I want the Harry Randall story.” She wished she knew a way to demand things from Leo, to sound imperious, not like a street beggar. Her only comfort, cold, was that all the reporters she knew felt, always, that they were on their knees before Leo.

His answer: “No.”

“Leo—”

“Forget it, Stone.”

“I'm the only—”

“There's no story. If there were, you'd be—”

“I knew him best.”

“You screwed him.”

Through gritted teeth: “No law against it. Not even
Tribune
policy, Leo.”

“You checked?”

She nodded. Leo's eyebrows shot up, usually a good sign, but not this time. Another beat, and then, “Forget it.” He swiveled his chair, began fingering the papers on his desk. Every reporter knew what that meant, but Laura stayed.

“Leo, there is a story.”

His square iron head nodded, not turning to her. “A full and fitting obit. Carl's writing it now.”

“He didn't kill himself.”

Now Leo did turn, and though she never would have said as much to anyone for fear of being called insane, she swore she saw a softening in his eyes. It was not in his voice, though, each steel word spoken with equal emphasis: “He jumped off the bridge.”

“No.”

Laura meant to say more, but Leo's words burst open in her brain like a booby-trapped box, and out of them sprang a vision: Harry, angry first as his car was forced over, then disbelieving, kicking and wrenching against the grip, frightened, being dragged to the rail. Harry, shouting, cursing, throwing punches that missed—not much of a fighter, he'd always said, that's why he became a newsman: they let you watch. What must it have been like, the push, the fall? How much of a struggle, how tight his grip on the stinging steel? Then Harry untethered, floating, flying, Harry—she suddenly understood—exultant as he knew it was unstoppable.

She heard “Stone!” and she'd heard it before, just now, maybe two other times. The scene on the bridge receded, and Laura was looking at Leo. He held his coffee before him like an amulet, his eyebrows knit tight together. She almost laughed: Leo looked so desperate.
It's all right,
she wanted to say,
I'm a reporter, you can yell at me. I won't dissolve into a puddle of tears on your office floor.

She swallowed the tears she was not going to dissolve into and said, “He didn't jump, Leo.”

“Stone, he jumped.”

“No. Leo”—leaning forward, trying to draw Leo into what she knew—“Leo, the McCaffery story was too huge. It was real. It was
Harry Randall.
He was back, he knew it, he loved it.
Loved
it, Leo.” She was trembling, vibrating the way the high-tension wires did.

“Loved it?”

“Of course he did! How could he not? Harry Randall? On to something like this? It's the story he needed, Leo, all these years.”

Leo threw her a sharp look, and Laura stopped herself. “He wouldn't have . . . he wouldn't have done this now, Leo. Not now.” She took a breath. “Six months ago, a year ago, maybe,” she offered.

In her mind she apologized to Harry for that injustice. Leo and the others had seen Harry like that. When he'd sat slumped in his chair, sleeves pushed up on a shirt he'd been in for three days, poking intermittently at his keyboard, scowling at his phone whenever it rang, they thought he was finished, suffering from inexplicable failures of nerve and direction, suffering from gin.

That wasn't the truth. The truth was this: Harry Randall had distanced himself from their work the way a man of changed appetites rises from a table of delicacies that formerly enticed him. Harry had taken his gin to a seat apart while others feasted; but he'd never begrudged them their meal, and he'd never had a wish to be invited back.

Harry had never cared what Leo or any of the Unbelievers thought of him, of his gin-fueled conversion from man-eater to vegetarian, and so Laura stoutly refused to care, either. But what Leo thought of Laura Stone—that she had not lost her judgment to grief and shock, that she had come to beg for this story because it was a juicy one, not because working on it would keep Harry's name before her all day, keep as hers whatever there was left of him—that was important now. So she agreed with Leo's idea of Harry, false as she knew it to be.

Although, a strange, unfamiliar voice inside her said, maybe right after September 11, when Harry had been more lost than she'd ever seen him, all the other reporters (Laura one of them) chasing after the stories, Harry paralyzed with sadness. Maybe then.

She silenced that voice, said to Leo, “But not since this story.”

“Stone,” Leo said, in a voice that could have been Leo thinking about what she'd said, or Leo thinking about how to tell her that delusional reporters had no place at his paper, “people don't fall off bridges by accident.”

“No.” A point of agreement. Laura forced herself to stay calm. “They don't.”

Leo leaned his chair back, tapped his sapphire signet ring on the newsroom glass. Every reporter who heard looked up. At one of them, Leo pointed. Hugh Jesselson, a cop reporter. Broad, blond, and rumpled, he lumbered to Leo's doorway.

“Jesselson,” Leo grunted. “You hearing anything about the Randall suicide being something else?”

Jesselson looked uncomfortably at Laura, but Leo was not giving him a pass, so he answered with a headshake.

“Nothing? No other theories?”

“No.”

“You have any?”

“Me?”

“Stone here thinks he didn't jump. Is she the only one?”

Jesselson looked at his shoes, a cop reporter's oxfords, worn and dusty. “No one . . . Haven't heard it.”

Contradicting his mountainous presence and abundant prose (that fullness the reason, it was said, that he'd never made the front), Jesselson pared spoken language to a nub. Talking with him was like getting telegrams.

“No police investigation?”

Jesselson looked up, but only at Leo. “Not real popular downtown these days. Randall.”

Leo glared. “In our business that's a
good
thing, Jesselson. Because of McCaffery?”

“Alive, a legend, McCaffery. Dead, a saint. Untouchable.”

Leo narrowed his eyes and stared at neither of them; both of them waited. “The McCaffery story, the fallout, then the reporter dies,” he said to Jesselson. “No one's interested?”

“The story, the fallout? Sure. Spano, the Fund, that lawyer. Lots of money at stake. Blood in the water.”

“So where are the sharks?”

“Later. When things get back to normal. Feeling seems to be this can wait.”

“But Randall? No one's interested in that?”

Jesselson turned to Laura again, his eyes those of a man regretting the bad news he's brought. “No.”

Leo looked at Laura.

“They're wrong,” she said.

“NYPD doesn't seem to agree.”

“NYPD has enough to do.”

Undeniably true. Detectives in surgical masks were clambering over the landfill mountain on Staten Island, spreading out the rubble that came in in buckets, picking through it for body parts and evidence. Uniformed officers stood at concrete barricades at City Hall, at the reservoirs, at tourist sites as they reopened. Cops in every precinct answered a deluge of calls about letters and packages citizens were afraid of.

“You have anything else?” Leo rubbed his enormous jaw. “Or just that the story was too good?”

“A story like this? That he broke? Harry was never—he was never suicidal.” A tough word, but she got it out. “Not since I've known him. Jesus, Leo, not even after what happened.” Like all New Yorkers, Laura waved an arm toward downtown, toward Ground Zero, when she said “what happened”; and like all New Yorkers, Leo knew without question what she meant. Her voice rose, louder and higher. “Leo, he had something else, he was on to something! And we're supposed to believe he jumped off a bridge
now
? Why would he do that?”

Leo eyed her, picked up the important words. “Something else?”

Laura nodded, told Leo: “He left papers.”

“Randall?”

“No, Leo! The firefighter. McCaffery. Papers no one had seen. Harry was on his way to see them. It's the last thing he told me.”

Yesterday afternoon—yesterday? No, it must have been years ago, centuries, when her heart, now a barren desert, had been a boundless, teeming sea—Laura had been sitting at her desk, polishing her SoHo merchant story, checking her e-mail every fifteen minutes, as always.

It was one of the first things the legendary Harry Randall had noticed about the new kid, Laura Stone: the way she surfaced from the depths of a project to snap at e-mail like a trout at flies. Harry's desk was behind Laura's, a little off to one side. She'd never dared speak to him except, on the day she'd joined the
Tribune,
to shake his hand and tell him how thrilled she was to be working at the same paper with him. (That, in the five minutes Leo allotted a new reporter to get settled before he started asking where the hell her copy was.)

Toward the end of her second week at the paper, as she was typing a fast e-mail confirmation of a meeting finally agreed to by a reluctant source, a quiet voice in her ear made Laura jump: “You're driving me crazy.”

She spun around, and Harry Randall was leaning over her, cockeyed sardonic grin, blue eyes, shirtsleeves and all.

“I—but—” In her mind Laura had been rehearsing approaches to the great man since the moment she'd started. Now, one hand on the back of her chair, the other on her desk, he was bending to talk to her as though they already knew each other well.

“It's hard,” he said, “for an ancient beached whale such as myself to continue doing as little as possible, in order to avoid disturbing the balance of the universe, in the face of Leo's insistence on introducing a tiger shark such as
your
self to disrupt what small tranquillity I've been able to create in this goldfish bowl.” He waved his arm to show her reporters rushing in and out, or creating private tempests at their desks. “But do I complain? No, I do not. I try to go on. At least at first. But more and more, each day, my peace is destroyed, my meditation upon the great nothingness interrupted. And finally, I must speak.”

Laura, realizing her mouth was open, closed it. The only coherent thought she had was:
He has freckles.

“Every time you check your e-mail”—he stabbed an accusing finger at Laura's monitor—“your screen flickers, a great wave crashing onto the peaceful beach of my thoughts. And you do this every five minutes.”

“Fifteen,” Laura sputtered.

“Aha! So you admit it, then?”

“I— Of course I do! In case something's come up. In case someone—I'm sorry. I don't mean to disturb you. What if I tilt it?”

“Don't tilt it.
Turn
it.” Harry pushed Laura's monitor a quarter of an inch with his fingertip. He went back, sat at his own desk, shook his head, came back, and pushed it again. This time, back at his own desk, he nodded happily. “Thank you.”

“You're welcome,” said Laura. She turned back to her work, and, ignoring the heat in her cheeks, tried to remember what it was she'd been doing.

Fifteen minutes later she checked her e-mail. The only new message was from Harry Randall:
HAVE LUNCH WITH ME?

And so yesterday, as always, Laura had clicked on her e-mail every fifteen minutes. Routine; nothing interesting. Then, midmorning, this, from Harry: Subject Line:
WOO-EEE!
Text:
I
'
M ONTO SOMETHING, MY LITTLE TIGER SHARK. MCCAFFERY LEFT PAPERS! HOT STUFF. OR SO I
'
M TOLD. ON MY WAY TO GET A GLIMPSE
—
MORE LATER. H