Blood of My Brother (2 page)

Jay paid for his Eskimo Pie, peeled off its silver wrapper, and drifted over to the cyclone fence that surrounded the schoolyard. There, as he did every day, he would eat it while watching the doings of his classmates, absorbed in these creatures called other children, like him and not like him. When he reached the fence he heard a loud pop coming from the direction of the projects. He gazed that way, and then his attention was drawn to the front of the church, about fifty feet away, to his right, where a man in a black suit was kneeling, holding his arm, and where a bronze coffin had fallen with
a loud clang to the sidewalk. Immediately there were two more pops, and a motorcycle policeman, who was one of two that were about to lead the funeral procession to the cemetery, was toppling from his seat, and the mourners, dressed in black, were pointing up to the roof of Building E and scrambling for cover along the sides of the hearse and the limos.

Jay watched, amazed, his ice cream forgotten, as the second cop dragged his fallen comrade to the sidewalk side of the hearse, and then pulled his two-way radio from his belt and began shouting into it. The two nuns who had brought the children out to the street, one an old crone straight from Italy’s Potenza Province, hated and feared by the entire class, the other a young Irish beauty with a mesmerizing, lilting accent, swung swiftly and forcefully into action, herding the group through the gate in the cyclone fence and harrying them like border collies toward the school. Jay, out of sight of the nuns, was about to join his classmates when a boy whom he knew to be named Danny—a brash, stockily built boy, with big eyes wide apart and a shock of black hair—grabbed his arm and said, “We won’t see anything from in there. Follow me!”

Jay did. He dropped his ice cream and followed Danny as he ran down Sheffield Street, darting past the mourners and policemen huddled behind the limousines, up the wide imported stone steps of the church, whose massive wooden doors stood open to the summer day. Then, once inside, up more steps at the side of the vestibule to the bell tower, where large open-air arches gave a perfect panoramic view of the scene below, as well as across the street to the roof of Building E.

“Look!” said Danny, pointing up.

Kneeling at the parapet was a black man of indeterminate
age, shirtless, his muscles rippling, a rifle cradled in his arms. In silhouette, the sun behind him, there was a stillness, an ease, to this figure, as if he had been manning this rooftop, waiting to shoot white people, for years. Directly below, the coffin squatted on the sidewalk, forlorn, while the pallbearers and other family and friends of the deceased tried their best to attend to the two injured men in the shelter of the limos. The cop was bleeding from a chest wound, a deep maroon stain spreading across his pale blue shirt. Sirens were screaming close by.

Looking toward Seventh Avenue, the boys saw an ambulance and four police cars round the corner and hurtle toward the church. The man on the roof took careful aim at the lead car. When it stopped and the policemen in it jumped out, he fired off three shots—
pop, pop, pop
—then he ducked and was seen no more. The boys ducked, too. When they looked up a second later, there were cops running toward the entrance of Building E, and others were lined up behind their cars, firing rifles up at the parapet. The ambulance attendants, one black, one white, jumped out and began working on the cop with the chest wound. The firing stopped and all was still and quiet except for a harsh static from the radio of the lead patrol car. There were no other injured cops on the ground.

“I know that cop,” said Jay.

“Which one?”

“The one bleeding.”

“Who is he?”

“He comes in the bakery.”

“What bakery?”

“My dad’s. Cassio’s.”

Jay pointed to the bakery, and was astonished, as he did, to see his father running out of the front door, unwrapping
his apron as he went, heading for the entrance to the school. He wove through a gathering crowd of people, white from Seventh Avenue, black from the projects, but was stopped at the foot of Sheffield Street by two cops who were manning a hastily thrown up roadblock. A.J. Cassio, bulky and muscled from years of making bread by hand, and not past his prime at thirty-three, went chest to chest with one of the cops, shouting something and pointing toward the school. The second cop took hold of A.J.’s arm and quieted him down, then turned and headed into the schoolyard.

“That’s my dad,” said Jay.

“He’s looking for you.”

Jay said nothing, his gaze fixed on his father, who was staring intensely toward the school entrance. The first cop, who had kept his composure throughout, was now carefully steering A.J. away from the roadblock. The wounded cop directly below was now on a stretcher and being lifted into the ambulance, while cops in flak jackets were leading the mourners back into the church.

“Does he hit you?” Danny asked.

“No.”

“That’s good, but remember, we came to the church to say a prayer.”

Jay turned and looked Dan fully in the face for the first time. On that face was a combination of beguiling innocence and sly defiance—the dark brown eyes laughing at some inner joke—that Jay was to encounter in joy and exasperation times without number in the years to come.

The phone was ringing as Jay Cassio walked into his office in the old Fidelity Bank building near the Essex County Courthouse in Newark. He picked it up, swinging the cord wide as he settled himself into the leather covered, padded swivel chair behind his desk.

“Hello, law office,” he said.

“Jay? Al Garland. How are you?”

“I’m fine, Al,” Jay replied. “What’s up?”

“Do you represent a woman named Kate Powers?”

“Yes, I do,” Jay said. “Why?”

“What’s Kate’s story?”

Jay did not answer. He leaned back in his chair and ran the fingers of his free hand through his thick, wavy, dark brown hair, hair that fell below his ears and down the nape of his neck, and that was just beginning to go white at the temples. He had known Al Garland, the Essex County Prosecutor, for ten years, and never once had he called, out of the blue, to ask a question like this. A question he could not answer without violating Kate Powers’s attorney-client privilege.

“You’re kidding, right, Al,” he said, finally.

“The Newark police just found her head in the Passaic
River. They’re on the way to her house right now. Don’t count on getting paid for a while.”

“Jesus. Are they sure it’s her?”

“The head was in a garbage bag. Her wallet was in it, too.”

“Jesus . . .”

“I need your file, Jay,” Garland said abruptly. “They’re doing a subpoena.”

“Slow down, Al,” Jay said, trying at the same time to both fend off and to absorb the image of Kate Powers’s severed head floating in the grimy Passaic River. He could also feel the fine hair rising at the back of his neck and down his forearms, his anger rising at Garland’s hectoring, sarcastic tone of voice. “What do you think is in my file?”

“I don’t know,” said Garland. “You tell me.”

“I can’t tell you, you know that.”

“I assume it’s in your office.”

Jay did not answer. Garland in a bad temper was capable of anything, like sending a SWAT team to Jay’s office to seize the file.

“You wouldn’t
hide
it, Jay?” said Garland.

“I’m not giving it up without a court order,” Jay said. “Don’t send your people over here without one.”

“Don’t get yourself into an ethics situation over this,” said Garland.

Jay took a breath and looked up at the brown water stain that he fancied took the form of a dragon on one of the tiles in the dropped ceiling directly above his old wooden desk. Al Garland’s years of holding all the power in the criminal justice game had made him self-righteous and stiff in his dealings with the enemy: criminal defense lawyers, and others who stood in the way of his conviction machine. Jay and Garland had had a wary but respectful relationship for many
years, and Jay knew that it would pay neither to antagonize him nor to try to stroke him. He would do what he felt should be done no matter what Jay said.

“You know I’m entitled to go to court on this,” Jay said finally. “The file is privileged. I would have an ethics problem if I
didn’t
fight you.”

“How long have you represented her?”

“A year and a half.”

“Who’s the husband’s lawyer?”

“Bob Flynn. He’s had three. Flynn’s the third.”

“Why three lawyers?”

“Every time there was a court order for discovery, Powers changed lawyers. He was reluctant to let go of his paperwork.”

“He’s the big real estate guy, Bryce Powers & Company, correct?”

“That’s him.”

“Meet me at Judge Moran’s courtroom at nine o’clock tomorrow morning. I’ll call Flynn,” Garland said. “Take care of the file, Jay. I’m only doing this because it’s you.”

They hung up, and Jay stayed at his desk. The last of the day’s sun filtered through the slatted openings of the wooden Venetian blinds that covered the large window behind him, painting horizontal yellow bars on the rows of red and gold-embossed law books that lined the far wall. His secretary, Cheryl, was gone, and the building was quiet. He could hear the occasional car horn honking on Market Street two stories below. Newark had been trying desperately over the past decade or so, with some success, to revitalize itself; but for all its efforts, each evening at around six o’clock, its downtown merchants and professionals and working class people fled to their homes in the suburbs, and the city center, bustling all day long, became eerily quiet
while the cops waited for the next teenaged carjacker to go screaming by.

The mellow glow of his corner office did not match Jay’s mood. He and Melissa Powers, Kate’s twenty-two-year-old daughter—his
client’s
twenty-two-year-old daughter—had been lovers for six months. In the midst of their affair, Jay had received documents from Bryce Powers’s lawyer that revealed that Melissa and her older sister, Marcy, were each drawing a hundred thousand dollars a year for “maintenance services” from Plaza I and II, large hotel/retail/condo complexes in north Jersey’s upscale Bergen County, developed and managed by Bryce Powers & Company. The sole share-holders of a shell company, the Powers sisters were simply receiving an allowance from their father via phony service contracts. All cleaning and other routine services were done by Bryce Powers & Company employees. Over a million dollars had thus been siphoned from Plaza I and II in the past five years. Acutely aware of his obligation to retrieve her share of this money for Kate—to sue Marcy and Melissa for it if necessary—Jay, glad for the excuse, had ended the relationship with Melissa two months ago.

Rousing himself, he dialed the number of Dan Del Colliano, a private investigator and his lifelong friend, who had an office on the same floor as Jay. Jay had hired Dan to do some investigating in the Powers case, and wanted to let him know that he might be getting a visitor with a search warrant. There was no answer.

He then dialed Bob Flynn’s number, surprised when Flynn answered. It was close to seven p.m., by which time Flynn was usually on his second Manhattan at the Colonial, a local lawyers’ hangout near the courthouse.

“Bob,” said Jay, “did you get a call from Al Garland?”

“He just hung up,” said Flynn.

“Are you going to court tomorrow?” Jay asked.

“Do I have a choice?”

“What is it with Garland?”

“He’s loony tunes, Jay, power mad, you know that,” Flynn replied. “Are you worried about fucking the daughter?”

“Yes.”

“You deserve it.”

Jay could only laugh at Flynn’s directness. He did deserve it, he knew. He never should have gotten involved with the daughter of a client, especially one nineteen years younger than him. One whose father was worth seventy-five million, and who sat on a dozen philanthropic and Fortune 500 boards in the tri-state area. The beheading of this man’s wife would guarantee a lot of publicity. Jay’s name would undoubtedly come up, linked to both Kate and possibly Melissa, who, angry at being dumped, would hold their love affair over his head, a scarlet sword of Damocles. If dropped it wouldn’t kill him—he had done nothing unethical—but it would hurt his professional reputation, a lawyer’s most valued asset.

He had been thinking recently that there would be no real price to pay for his affair with Melissa Powers. He sat for a moment after hanging up the phone, staring at the dragon on his ceiling, pondering the error of that line of thought.

Jay concentrated on the pastel streaks of lavender and pink on the horizon as he drove home, trying, with little success, to distract himself from thinking of the tortured Kate Powers and the terrible way she had died. At home in suburban Montclair he changed into jeans and a polo shirt, made himself a drink, and sat down on his patio with the Powers divorce file, which he had copied in its entirety before leaving the office, certain that tomorrow he would be handing over the original to either Judge Moran or Al Garland. He skipped over the cold financial documents and hot client affidavits that constitute the typical lawyer’s divorce file, until he found the folder that contained the fifty-odd letters that Kate Powers had written to him in the eighteen months he had represented her. In a childlike, but oddly graceful script, the sentences often rambling and incoherent, they dealt mainly with Kate’s obsession with appearances and her anger at Bryce’s emotional and, of late, financial stinginess.

It was Kate’s mention of incest in one of these letters, of Bryce’s “fondling love for his daughters,” that brought Jay and Melissa together. He had felt compelled to interview her, and her denial was both succinct and credible. “My father
may be a prick,” she said with a smile, “but he’s no child molester.” Jay had asked her to confirm her statement in a short letter to him, which she did, adding a postscript inviting him to call her for a drink if the mood struck him, which, unfortunately, it did.