Personal injuries (14 page)

The municipal parking structure adjoining the courthouse was a five-tier open-air affair built in the same buff colored brick as the Temple. By plan, Wunsch, in an old Chesterfield topcoat, would already be lurking on the ground floor. Robbie would drive by him with no sign of recognition, racing up the circling lanes to the top floor, which, at this hour, was largely deserted. In time, we heard the Mercedes gearshift jammed into park and Robbie's tread as he crossed to the elevator. If all went according to the standard arrangement, when the elevator's brown doors rumbled back, Wunsch would be inside.

Robbie and Walter had been using the elevator for drops for years now. The tiny carriage was a squeeze even for four persons and a hopeless wreck. The tiled flooring was gone in most places and the elevator reeked from its use as a pissoir by various urban vagabonds. The contraption rose and descended at an infinitesimal pace, and with awful sounds, the cables squealing and the brakes clanging like steam pipes whenever the machine slowed to an actual halt. It was used by virtually no one, particularly on the way down. Robbie was speaking even before the doors labored to a close.

"Jesus, Wally, the old man had me wetting my socks with that Hamlet routine up there. I wrote him a great brief. What else was he looking for? Smoke signals?"

"Shit. Silvio? Half the time he don't know if it's today or tomorrow. And besides, you could give the old fuck a heart attack if you said `reversed on appeal.' Any chance the boys upstairs'll bounce a case back gives him the willies. He figures somebody somewhere's keepin track." A reversal on appeal would draw suspicion to a case. Malatesta, as Stan had deduced, was determined to eliminate even the remotest risks of discovery. "Believe me, I had to carry on with him a long time on this one. I deserve the freakin Oscar. I had to wipe his nose and diaper his behind before he did the right thing. Anyway," Walter concluded, in a tone meant to get down to business. Robbie said he'd brought some smokes. The sound of the cardboard ripping was distinct.

"Yeah," said Walter in time, "that's the right brand okay." "Fifteen long there."

"Mmm-mmm," Walter answered quietly.

"Cause I want the old man to remember I'm a righteous fella. You're gonna be seeing a lot of me." Robbie reminded Wunsch of the three new cases. Walter, predictably, was more ornery than grateful.

"This better not be the miracle-of-the-month club," he answered, "because after this one, Silvio's neck's back in his shell for a long while."

"This wasn't a miracle. I had great authorities."

"Shit," Walter answered. "That wasn't what I was hearing. You better make sure Santa's got me right on the top of his Christmas list. Santa better love me this year."

"We'll write you down for a bushel and a peck and a hug around the neck."

"Fuck."

"No, here you go, look at this." The distinct crinkling of what I knew to be a travel brochure could be heard, along with the scuffing of fabric as Feaver removed it from his pocket. Walter, like the other bagmen, expected a tip. But he preferred no cash. He had told Robbie that he had enough cash, a reference, presumably, to the share Malatesta provided from his end. More pertinently, over the years Mrs. Wunsch had figured out where Walter was likely to hide his stash and, by his reports, regularly looted it. As a result, he preferred tangible items and thought nothing of calling Robbie with requests for merchandise that had caught his eye. Robbie had it all shipped to Walter's country cottage, where his wife seldom visited. Recently, he'd been paying Wunsch's way to various golfing havens. He extolled the resort in Virginia portrayed in the brochure.

"Yeah, well, I'll go," Walter said, "but listen, since I had to carry your water so far uphill on this thing here, I had a thought. I been looking at some irons. Oversized Graphite shafts. You seen these Berthas? Nice clubs."

With appropriate grumbling, Robbie now agreed to add the irons, then slid the conversation toward the topics Sennett wanted him to cover.

"Listen, Wally, I gotta ask you one thing about the old man that's always bugged the hell out of me. I look at him up there on the bench. The guy dresses like a hobo." From the sound of it, Walter enjoyed the description. "And whenever I see him tooling around the courthouse, he's in some old heap, right?"

"'83 Chevy."

"And he and the wife still live in his mom's old bungalow in Kewahnee, right? Isn't that the story?

So what gives? It makes me nuts wondering: Where's it going?"

Over the speakers, there was a momentary lapse, during which the grinding motion of the elevator mechanism and the stiff wrinkling of the brochure going inside Walter's topcoat were audible. It was clear Wunsch did not welcome Robbie's curiosity.

"Feaver, this ain't a fuckin game show. You think I ask questions. I don't care if he's using it in the outhouse. What's it to you? I can't make no sense of whatever's goin on in Silvio's little noggin, anyway." Another silence followed, punctuated almost at once by the terrifying sound of the elevator brake being applied. The doors rumbled again as they retracted, followed by the scuffling of Walter's departure. Then there was an unexpected bouncing noise and Walter's voice was heard once more. He had apparently thrown a hand between the rubber bumpers on the closing elevator doors. Across the van, McManis tensed, anxious about the meaning of Wunsch's return.

"And listen," he said. "They got a big demand on these clubs. They're on back order. Okay? So you know, to get em, you know, they gotta be ordered right now."

"Gotcha," Robbie answered. The doors, finally closed, sealed off the sound of the city clamor heard in the background in the open-air garage.

In the van, as we listened to the elevator creak, to Bobbie padding back to the auto, to the engine rumbling to life, there was an immediate air of celebration. Walter Wunsch now had a confirmed reservation in a federal penitentiary, and he'd said enough damaging things about Malatesta that the recording would be useful both in forcing Walter to turn on the judge and in corroborating him once he did it. Stan shot a thumb in the air and unfastened his seat belt so he could move around the van, hunched from the waist, shaking hands. I noticed he made it a point to start with Jim. Yet as Amari drove back, I felt somewhat removed. I was happy enough to see the Project succeed, but I was more stunned than I'd anticipated by the events. I had always known there were monkeyshines of some kind going on in the Kindle County Superior Court. When I began practice as a new assistant State Defender, late in the 1960s, Zeb Mayal, a bail bondsman and ward boss, still sat in open view in the Central Branch courtroom issuing instructions to everyone present, often including the judge. But in the felony courthouse, on the other side of the canyon created by U.S. 843, 1 was always an outsider. I'd come to the law at my father's table, listening to him speak about the great principles of decisions, moments that remain in memory magical and intense, like the spotlight's circle of white on a darkened stage. I didn't understand those who saw the law only as either a commodity or a social lubricant, nor, frankly, did they know what to make of me. I had no committeeman, no parish to name, and was primly disdainful whenever someone suggested that I take steps selling tickets, for example, to a fund-raiser--to overcome these deficits. Over time, I realized that the system that existed, whatever it was, had as one of its principal aims closing out fellows like me, with my faint Southern accent, my unfaltering manners, my Brooks Brothers apparel, and my Easton degree. I was someone who had prospects in the Center City among the suits and the towers. Most of the regulars in the felony courthouse knew they counted for little in that realm, which was one of their foremost, if unspoken, excuses for taking care of each other. And eventually, as they expected, I departed for that other world, to the federal courts, where there was officiousness, but virtually no known corruption, beyond what was suspected about a few rogue drug agents.

Robbie's tales of retail justice were appalling, but also somehow titillating to me, because they suggested again some stifled secret I'd been searching for during my years across the highway. And now in the banter between Bobbie and Walter I heard it, the hard wisdom of their clandestine world. A strange message was communicated in the passing of cash: I know the worst about you, you know the worst about me. The claims of law, rules, the larger community, the fabled, phony distinctions of class, are all, in the end, as insubstantial as dreams. Palaver aside, the black truth, which only we dare speak and which, as a result, gives us insuperable power, is that we are all servants of selfish appetites. All. All of us.

All.

"FIELD HOCKEY?"

"Yes, field hockey. It's been an Olympic sport longer than basketball."

"I know. Really, I know that. Guys get killed, right? In Pakistan? Somebody's always getting brained with that thing. The cudgel."

"The stick."

"Stick. It can be dangerous."

She stopped and lifted her lip to show him where there was still a pink scar. His black eyes, silvered by the streetlights, shifted back and forth from the traffic. Now that he was past his initial surprise, he nodded gravely, almost slavishly, clearly hoping to forestall any dread on her part that she had finally told him.

But she felt little regret. It was a good night. Neither one of them was down yet from the thrill of getting Walter. And, in truth, he'd guessed. About two weeks ago, he'd bought something called
The Olympic Factbook
and once or twice on the ride to or from work, he'd toss an event at her, usually as a non sequitur. He'd started with archery and went right through the alphabet. He was cute about it, of course, making his determination a joke, putting on a poor-mouthing, little-boy look. This morning he'd gotten to fencing, and tonight he'd had no trouble reading her smile. She was revealing only a fraction of what would come out about her eventually, now that there was certain to be a prosecution. And he'd been right at the start; he was too good an actor to blow the cover.

"The Olympics," he said, in dazzled admiration. Guys were always like this, staggered that a female had lived out their fantasies. "You probably couldn't even believe it was real." Some would say it hadn't been. It was '84, so the Soviet bloc didn't show, but none of those teams were a power that year, so for her the glow had been largely undiminished.

"And you were great, right?" he asked. "To make the Olympics you had to be great." Great? There was too much heat in the car and she was almost groggy. She had thought she was great. In high school, she was the best in Colorado, where no more than half the high schools even played. She was runner-up for Female Athlete of the Year in-state, and received a scholarship to Iowa, one of the great programs in the country, the absolute tops west of the Mississippi. She had gone off with high hopes. She was selected for the National Senior Team as a sophomore. It meant she was being groomed for the Olympics. But two of her teammates at Iowa were also on the squad, one a defender/midfielder like her, and both of them better than she was. They were stars, bigger stars than Evon. She played in the Olympics. But she did not start. Whenever she heard people talk about the Peter Principle, rising to your highest level of incompetence, she thought about her experience in field hockey. She had worked and strived and played against the best in the world and found, in the end, that the very best were better than she was. When the team took home a bronze medal, she thought, How appropriate, how doggone appropriate.

For Feaver, she kept it simple: she didn't start.

"But you were
there
." He was excited by the idea, clearly gripped again by some revived feeling of his own passionate hope for stardom. He was questioning her as an expert, as someone who'd arrived, who could tell him, perhaps, how he had missed the goal. How had she found the fortitude to pay the price? Where did it come from? The drive? The spark?

Her responses were laconic. She described practicing until long after dark, the way she had fallen asleep with a stick in her hand, not once or twice but a hundred times, reviewing moves in her head. She'd been through a stretch at Iowa when she had not spent even a single holiday with her family, a period in which Thanksgiving to her only meant prep time for the NCAAs and Christmas the "A" Camp in New Jersey, when even the Fourth of July was lost to the National Futures Tournament and in which the time devoted to sport meant it took six years for her B.A. Field hockey became a tunnel in her life, a long passage in which there was little external light. When it was suddenly over, she was like some underworld person returned to daytime, blinded, dazzled. But beyond detailing her devotion, she could not share an answer to his questions. She was just not as open, or sloppy, choose the word, as he was; she could never take the joy or comfort he seemed to find in revealing himself. It had just been the path that was clear to her. Her father had been a baseball star. And it turned out his ability had leaped generations like an electrical arc. Evon had his power, his surprising speed from such a bandy build, and the precision to make that astonishing triangulation about where a flying ball, her body, and her stick were going to arrive. In the game, with the moving hand of the clock feeling as if it were winding her heart tighter, with the dimension of the known universe shrunk to 100 yards by 60 and its population reduced to the other twenty-one women on the field, with grace and fury possessing her as if they were visiting from somewhere else-at those moments she was finally, fully herself, not the odd, unknown, scowling girl lost in her tumbling home.

Her father lit up like a lantern when she played, paced the side, at times too stirred up to watch, but her mother never really seemed to care for the sight of her, even when she ran from the field in victory. Her hair clung in damp ringlets to her cheeks, her uniform was mud-spotted, and her knee pads and socks were dragging down. Often, at the end of the game, she could see that she was where she had started, odd and vaguely unwelcome. Not simply because she was a girl good at what many still thought was reserved for boys, but because in her passion, in the explosive furious way she crossed the field, she was revealing something about herself, much like her scowling, which others did not want to know.