Mean Streak (23 page)

She'd been trying to jolly me out of my anger at Matt Riordan; now she just laughed. “That must be what kept you two together all that time,” she said. “I think you both like troubled waters better than calm ones. Who knows?” she went on. “Maybe this trial will bring you together again.”

I shook my head. “Not if he's going to make a practice of hopping from my bed to Taylor's.” I pulled the straw out of the thick liquid and set it on the counter. Then I lifted the glass, tilted it and let a large glob of shake fill my mouth. Little flecks of fruit hit my taste buds; she'd used deep, dark cherries and the flavor was intoxicating. Her folks back in Michigan had shipped her a selection that included sour and sweet, Bing and yellow.

“Great stuff,” I said when I'd swallowed.

She rewarded me with a smile. “My very first date was at the Cherry Festival,” she recalled. “Bobby Anson was the only boy in school who was taller than me. He was skinny as a string, but he had an inch on me, so he asked me to the Festival and bought me a shake. A whole one just for me. I carried it around till it melted into mush, just so the other girls could see me with it and know I was on a real date. He kissed me on the Ferris wheel.”

Her big blue eyes had taken on a dreamy look. This was a Dorinda I'd seldom seen; by the time we met at Kent State, she'd been a full-blown hippie with long Indian skirts and flowers in her hair.

“Where is he now?” I asked.

“Lansing,” she replied. “At least that's what my mom said. With a wife and three kids.”

“Do you ever wonder,” I began, “what your life would have been like if you—”

“Not really,” she said. She turned her back and began to fuss with the danishes she'd made with yellow cherries.

I wasn't buying that. “Of course you do,” I persisted. “Everybody does. Don't you think I wonder sometimes what my life would have been if I'd stayed in Ohio, gotten married, had kids, joined the PTA?”

“You'd have been miserable,” Dorinda said. “And what's worse, your kids would have been, too. You'd have no outlet for your energy, your anger.”

“Do I really have that much anger?” I wasn't sure I wanted to know.

Dorinda laughed. It was a nice laugh, a laugh that said she liked me and was going to keep on liking me no matter how she answered that question.

“The first time I met you, you were ranting about some injustice on campus. I don't remember what it was, but I remember thinking you needed to mellow out, smoke a joint or something.”

“Yes,” I said, deliberately choosing a tone as sweet as Dorinda's cherry shake. “As I recall, that was your all-purpose remedy for everything in those days. Hell, you thought the war would end if Nixon and Ho Chi Minh would just pass a doobie back and forth.”

“And you thought it would end if you marched on Washington enough times. We were both wrong.”

Yes, but I was righter, I wanted to say. Marching accomplished something. Marching told the country to stop and think it over. Marching was action. Smoking dope was passive, self-involved, self-indulgent.

Protesting, of course, was never self-indulgent.

Neither was anger.

My milkshake had melted into a sticky pink puddle. I pushed it away, suddenly sickened by its childish sweetness. “Got any more iced coffee?” I asked.

Dorinda walked toward the sun tea container where she kept the cold coffee. “Coffee,” she pronounced, “is a drink of anger.”

I gave this piece of wisdom some thought. “Anger is good for the blood,” I pronounced back. I could play Wise Woman as well as Dorinda. “Anger tones you, puts you on your mettle, makes you feel alive. Without anger, I'd be a blob. I'd have nothing but contentment, and, contrary to the belief of those of you who spent the sixties in a haze of marijuana smoke, contentment is not enough.”

“I may have to take it back,” my friend remarked.

“Take it back about what?”

“About Riordan. You and he may have been made for one another after all.”

C
HAPTER
T
WELVE

“‘So what do you think of your blue-eyed boy now, Mr. Death?'” I tossed the words onto the table like a gauntlet and waited for the Grand Old Man of New York muckraking to pick them up.

He did. He saw my e. e. cummings and raised with Kenneth Rexroth.

“‘You killed him,'” he intoned, with a nod of his lion head. “‘You killed him in your Goddamned Brooks Brothers suit.'”

He heaved a sigh and let his gravel voice rumble on. “Only it wasn't true about Dylan Thomas. Nobody, in or out of a Brooks Brothers suit, killed Thomas. He drank himself to death, and no amount of poetry can shift the blame to someone else. I met him once or twice, back in the old days, at the White Horse Tavern. He may have been the finest poet in the English language, but he was a mean, sloppy drunk. He died. Nobody killed him.”

“But somebody killed Eddie Fitz,” I reminded Winthrop. “Somebody iced him. My question to you is: By the time he died, was he still your blue-eyed boy? Did you still believe he was incorruptible?”

Another sigh. Jesse Winthrop seemed to be carrying a load as heavy as the one that burdened the statue of Atlas in Rockefeller Center. “No,” he said at last. He looked away, focusing on the huge cappuccino urn in the back of The Peacock. This time we didn't have a coveted window table; we sat in the middle of the coffeehouse. At the table next to us, three first-year law students from nearby NYU argued about the Rule Against Perpetuities. I smiled in recognition, seeing my younger self as a passionate but deeply confused law student (any law student not confused by the Rule Against Perpetuities instantly became an expert in wills and trusts; the rest of us moved on to other specialties).

“No,” Winthrop went on, heaving another sigh, “those tapes you sent me of that drug dealer convinced me. But I still don't approve,” he added, his tone sharpening, “of your client's methods of dealing with witnesses he doesn't like.”

“You don't seriously think Matt Riordan killed Eddie?” I seemed to be asking that question of far too many people lately.

“Believe it or not,” Winthrop assured me, “I know better than to accept as gospel everything I read in the
Post
.” As I'd predicted and feared, a photo of Matt with his hands in the air, being searched for a weapon, had been plastered on the front page of the tabloid under a bloodred headline that read MOB LAWYER KEY SUSPECT IN COP KILLING.

In much smaller letters underneath the picture, the
Post
admitted there had been no arrest.

“Since you have such an open mind,” I said, trying hard to suppress the sarcastic edge to my voice, “why don't I tell you the whole story of what went on in the plaza last night?”

I did, starting with the anonymous fax and Matt's determination to meet the sender and see what dirt he could get on Lazarus. I continued with Matt's account of what he'd seen in the plaza, of the three other suspects who'd been in the area at the same time.

“So it seems clear,” I finished, “that whoever this faxer was, he probably lured Stan Krieger to the plaza with the same kind of bait. Something that would help Krieger in his own troubles with the police. Davia Singer was already there, but it seems equally clear that whoever killed Eddie knew she was in the habit of meeting him at the sculpture after work. And Lazarus has a reputation for working very late hours, so it wasn't much of a stretch to think he'd be around at midnight.”

“You think the murder was premeditated, then,” Winthrop said. “Not a spur-of-the-moment thing, an impulse.”

“Not with four prime suspects all on the scene at a time when at least two of them, Riordan and Krieger, would ordinarily have no reason to be there. Not with three out of four of those suspects standing alone at different landmarks in the plaza, none of them really able to alibi the others for the whole time. Not with—”

“You make this killer sound like a real manipulator. A chessmaster,” Winthrop cut in.

“Yeah, I guess so,” I agreed. “I don't know what ploy he used to get Krieger to the plaza, but I can guess.”

“You say ‘he,'” the journalist pointed out. “Are you ready to eliminate Davia Singer as a suspect?”

“No,” I admitted. “But I do have my eye on Lazarus. He's the one whose balls are on the line here. He'd have access to the kind of inside information that could bring Stan Krieger to the plaza. He'd know how to jerk Riordan's chain as well, how to bait the hook that brought him to the plaza. And I can't believe he's ignorant of the little affair between Singer and Eddie.”

“Doesn't it occur to you that the same could be said for your client?” Winthrop's eyebrows rose, and he held up a hand to forestall my protests. It was a workingman's hand, callused and hard-fingered. I decided he was a woodworker in his spare time.

“Hear me out before you start preparing your defense, Counselor,” he urged. “Don't you think Matt Riordan is smart enough to plan Eddie's murder and cover his own ass by making sure he committed the crime at a time and place when Lazarus and Singer would be on the scene? And don't you think he knows enough about cops to set a trap for Stan Krieger? Don't you think he's capable of faxing himself an anonymous message, to explain his own presence in the plaza? Everything you've said about Lazarus is equally possible for Riordan.”

“But Lazarus is the one who really benefits from Eddie's death,” I protested. “Matt had no reason to kill Eddie; he wanted to destroy him in court.”

“No reason other than revenge,” Jesse Winthrop said in a deceptively soft tone. “No reason other than to wipe off the face of the earth the man who'd humiliated him, who'd almost cost him his professional life. And to put a frame around his old enemy Lazarus at the same time.”

“Then why drag in Krieger?” I countered. “Why not tighten the noose around Lazarus instead?”

The waitress hovered next to me, waiting for an order. One thing about The Peacock, it was possible to sit there for a half hour before anyone mustered enough energy to walk over and see what you wanted. I ordered iced cappuccino, Winthrop a double espresso with lemon peel.

After she walked away, it occurred to me that I'd defended my client and sometime lover, not on the grounds that he wouldn't commit murder and frame an innocent man for it, but on the grounds that he'd have done it more efficiently, without muddying the waters with bitter, crooked cops and jilted lovers.

“I've heard a little something through my police sources,” Winthrop went on. “I've heard they're comparing the bullets that killed Eddie with the bullets that killed TJ and Nunzie Aiello.”

I dismissed this with an airy wave of my hand. “That's just Warren Zebart's wishful thinking,” I said. “He'd like nothing better than to nail Riordan for every mob crime going back to Judge Crater's disappearance.”

“What if there's a match?”

“Well, I still have my suspicions that Lazarus had TJ eliminated, so a similarity of ballistics there won't shake me up much. And I read the police reports on both TJ and Nunzie, and as I recall, the bullets mushroomed pretty badly. I'm not sure they can get a match in any case.”

We stopped when the drinks came. I sipped cappuccino and watched my companion taste his dark, bitter brew, lifting the tiny cup to his lips as if he were the guest of honor at a tea party for dolls.

“All my life, I've hated guys like Eddie Fitz,” he mused aloud. “I've hated the bully boys and the big dicks and the fascists. Because to me they're all the same thing. They're all variations on a theme: ‘I've got power and you don't.' That's what they're all about, guys like that. And I was the kid on the playground fifty years ago who'd stand up against those guys and defend the kids they picked on. I was strong and big enough that I could have been a bully too, but somehow I wasn't. Somehow I stood between those guys and the fat kid, the retarded kid, the girl they called the class slut.”

I could see it. I had a sudden image of Jesse Winthrop as a boy, standing in an old-fashioned schoolyard with his legs apart, chin thrust out, eyes blazing with anger. Fighting back with logic and with words, with fists if he had to. And when he'd graduated from the playground, he'd fought back with his column. Instead of bloodying the noses of the bullies, he'd exposed their scams, revealed their petty political machinations.

Until now. Until he'd fallen under the spell of Eddie Fitz.

“So what changed?” I asked. “How did you miss the fact that Eddie Fitz was just another bully?”

“I'm not sure I did miss it,” he replied, his grating voice as soft as he could make it. “I'm not sure, but I think I ignored my gut on this one. I met Ike Straub, you know. I met him and I saw the way Eddie treated him, and I ignored it. I chose to believe they were friends, equals, but the truth was right in front of me: Eddie had that kid buffaloed. Straub was the little sycophant all bullies like to keep at their sides. A one-man cheering section, a guy who can always be counted on to play yes-man and butt.”

“Like Paulie the Cork,” I said, recalling the tapes of Eddie's meetings with Fat Jack.

“Yeah, him, too,” Jesse agreed. “He was like Dwight, only older. And getting older just means the bullies dump on you even more. Poor stupid little fucker.”

“You mean Dwight, I suppose,” I commented.

“Hell, I guess I mean all the misguided assholes who think their dick is the most important thing in their lives. You're a woman, you know what I mean. How many guys do you know who lead with their dicks? Guys like Eddie, it's a macho thing you can see coming a mile away. But listen to these three at the next table, and what do you hear?”

I listened and gave my companion a wry smile; I heard what I'd been hearing ever since my first day at NYU Law School. Three guys arguing about whose was bigger. Oh, they thought they were arguing about the Rule Against Perpetuities; they would have sworn they were having a perfectly logical legal discussion that would help all three of them pass Property. But underneath, the refrain was exactly what Jesse Winthrop said it was. One guy was trying to prove to his fellows that he knew it all, and that his knowledge made him better, made his bigger than theirs. The others were fighting back, championing their own viewpoints, but they accepted the underlying premise all too readily: Whoever was right was King of the Hill, which meant that being right was everything and being wrong made you a eunuch.