Personal injuries (38 page)

"What's this about?" he asked.

I hadn't a clue.

Stan's mood, when Danny showed him in, was quite formal. He was in his usual immaculate blue suit and he took the trouble to shake Robbie's hand, which I didn't recall him bothering with before. He expressed his sympathies and, finding them tepidly received, put himself down in the maroon chair Robbie usually occupied. Sennett spent a moment arranging himself, reaching down to straighten the crease on his trouser leg, before beginning.

"I wanted to advise you both of a very unusual meeting I had the afternoon before last. I would have done this sooner, but for Robbie's circumstances. It was with an old friend of ours. Of all of ours. Magda Medzyk." Stan looked into his lap at that point, his expression taut.

"She had consulted an attorney that morning, Sandy Stern." Stan nodded toward me. Stern, who reviles Stan for reasons I have never fully understood, is my best friend in practice. "That was our good fortune. Mr. Stem declined to represent her, telling her he had an undisclosed conflict, but he suggested she approach me, rather than the P A.'s office, where political allegiances could occasionally become problematic. She waited more than an hour before I got back, and when she came in, she told me a long, somewhat tawdry story about her relationship with a personal injury attorney named Robert Feaver.

"Mr. Feaver, she said, had asked her to throw a case the night before. He actually seemed to be offering her money to do it. She wasn't quite certain of that, because she was so upset, so alarmed, she didn't follow every word. But there was no mistake that he wanted her to alter the outcome of the case. The judge told me that she will enter an order recusing herself from the matter. But she wanted to inform me first because she was willing, if need be, to wear a wire against Mr. Feaver, prior to that." Trying to be grave, Stan still could not stifle a smile at the irony. He said that Magda had willingly accepted his guidance. Aside from withdrawing from the case, she would undertake no action or alert any other party in order to allow the government to investigate. She'd await further word from Stan.

Sennett waved his chin around to loosen his neck from the grip of his shirt collar, before turning to Feaver beside him.

"She's quite an extraordinary person," Stan said.

Robbie did not move. His shadowed eyes remained on Sennett, who, to his credit, declined to look away.

"'An extraordinary person'?" Robbie finally asked. "Stan, do you know how Magda Medzyk spent the night after I left there? Have you got a clue? Because I do. I was sitting there burying my mother yesterday and I saw Magda, like a vision, like it was on TV. I saw her at that little kitchen table all night long. She barely moved. She only got up once. To get her rosary. She just sat there begging the Mother of God to help her find some little piece of herself that could go on with whatever was left of her life, only some sliver of her soul, because the rest of it had been swallowed up by shame." He stood up then. "'An extraordinary person,"' he repeated. He directed one last harsh look at Sennett, kicked over my wastebasket, picked it up, and left. Stan took just an instant to recover. At my door, he tipped an imaginary hat. I found his behavior oddly consistent with my lifetime experience of Stan. Just when I was ready to give up on him, he'd redeem himself. As a line prosecutor he'd shown all the tenderness of a blunt instrument, but when he became Chief Deputy P .A. under Raymond Horgan, he exhibited monumental strength in reforming the office and especially in loosening the grip of the Police Force, with its political crosscurrents, over prosecutions. Shortly before he'd married Nora Flinn, her mother, expecting the couple to have children, chose to reveal the fact that she was not Portuguese, as Nora and her brother had always been told, but black. Stan, so far as I could tell, had never flinched. Instead, he had been an admirable support, even an example, in helping Nora come to terms not only with her anger at her mother but with the uglier stuff that would seep out of the hearts of most white Americans in the same situation. And when, as luck would have it, age later prevented them from being able to conceive, it was Stan who first suggested adopting a child of mixed race.

Today, he had arrived here, the Mountain to Mohammed, with the clear intent to be what was once referred to as A Man, knowing Feaver would dish out exactly what he had gotten. He'd come anyway, not merely to concede an error, not only to apologize to Robbie or to grant that my anger had been well placed, but to acknowledge that Feaver, disingenuous and compromised as he was, remained an able judge of character. Being as coolly objective as Stan, one could say that he was better with principles than with personalities. But as he went on his way, doing his best to look uncrimped, he left behind the saving information that he remained subject to the discipline of his own beliefs.

THE FOLLOWING THURSDAY, the week before Memorial Day, Robbie resumed his activities. With Evon, he returned to Judith's to deliver the money Sherm had demanded. Judith, who'd plainly had a merciless ruction with her brother, refused even to look at Robbie, but the envelope went in the register drawer. Amari and his watchers had better luck this time in trailing the funds. Crowthers himself arrived for a late lunch and casually took the small white envelope from Judith, his hand lowered to his side while he was joshing with the kitchen staff. His first stop in the courthouse, even before his own chambers, had been at Kosic's small office, adjoining Tuohey's. The wiretap, briefly activated, revealed little more than greetings. Something hit the desk, but no one could say for certain it was money. Somehow Kosic knew the source of the payment already or perhaps, out of extreme caution, sources were never identified, because nothing about that had been said.

But there was no question Rollo had received a share. No more than two hours later, Kosic paid for steak dinners for Brendan and himself at Shaver's, an old-fashioned joint not far from their home. One of the surveillance agents, seated only two tables away, had watched Rollo lay a $100

bill in the plastic folder in which the tab was presented. The agent jumped up and asked if Kosic minded exchanging five twenties for the C-note, claiming he wanted to fill a graduation card for his nephew. Not only did the serial number match one of the bills Robbie had dropped to Judith earlier but lifts raised a thumbprint so large the agents were all convinced-correctly, as it turned out that it was Sherm's. Kosic was now a long way to being cooked. And Crowthers was fully grilled. There would be no argument that anything Sherm had said to Robbie was merely a rambunctious jest. Despite the middling results with the wiretap, Stan was confident that Judge Winchell would agree to a full thirty-day overhear in Kosic's office. Something on Brendan was bound to turn up. Sennett reported this information to the UCAs that night, clearly aiming to inspire everybody as they moved into the critical stage. Evon had come back to the Center City to attend the meeting, then returned to her apartment.

A large mirror with a frame of beveled glass hung as a wall decoration across from the elevator on her floor. Even when she glanced in the usual solemn fashion at her reflectioR, she knew something was wrong. She could never have identified what was out of place, but once she turned the comer down the narrow hall, she could see the door to her apartment ajar. She stole to the threshold and lined herself up, shoulder to the left jamb, using the palm of her left hand to slowly push the door open. For the one hundredth time since Walter told Robbie that Marty Carmody thought she was an FBI agent, she longed for her weapon.

Inside, she heard someone clear his throat, and then another voice. Call the locals, she told herself, meaning the Kindle County police. Back out and dial 911. She had a cell phone in her purse. But this was the stuff she lived for. The cowboy types on a bust were always there for the power, sticking their .44 Magnum in somebody's ear and calling him motherfucker, hoping for a

`brownie'; she'd never been able to see that as a trophy, since you had to tolerate the stink when you brought the poor bastard in. But for Evon, all roads led back to game day, to the telling moment of precise reaction. She loved to win, loved herself when she triumphed, in the pure, uncompromised way she'd transplanted from that earlier part of her life. She was not calling the locals. She was halfway down the front hall now, spidering along with her backside to the wall. Recently, she'd been playing softball, a Sunday pickup game in a nearby park, kind of a boys-meetgirls event, but many of the participants competed seriously, and she'd bought a black graphite bat last week, which was still propped in a corner a few feet from where she was now, in the living room. Ahead, she saw a shadow move. She flattened herself and held her breath. Voices sputtered up once more. She had just placed the source when a middle-aged slope-bellied copper stopped at the end of the hallway and looked her up and down. He was pug-nosed and fairly cheerful-looking, despite his eyes, which were so small they had barely any whites. He reached to his belt to turn down his radio.

"Lady of the house?" he asked.

"Something like that." She showed him her key.

"Got a report," he said. "Burglary in progress. But I guess we missed them. You want to step back outside, I'll just finish. Take a minute. Or wait in the kitchen. I've already covered that." The whole apartment had been tossed. Cabinets, dressers. The officer had a flashlight in his hand and was stepping carefully over the drawers of her bedroom wardrobe and their contents, which had been emptied out here on the meal-colored rug. He was agile for a big man, for somebody his age.

In the kitchen, the back door was wide open. There was nothing subtle. The dead bolt had been forced right through the plaster, leaving, even now, bitter white dust in the air and a crater in the wall the shape of a bowler hat. A piece of wallpaper hung down, as if exhausted, and the molding had been pulled straight off, revealing the three-inch straight nails with which the finish carpenters had applied it. Crowbar, she decided and was surprised, stepping to the threshold, to see the tool outside, still resting on the steel fire escape.

"The crowbar they used is on the back porch yet," she called. "You might want it for prints." She'd returned to the living room. The copper looked back into the bedroom for something and took his time in responding.

"You don't get much from that kind of surface," he said. "But I'll take it along." In the kitchen, an empty plastic bag from the grocery produce section rested on the counter. He asked if she could spare it and he grabbed the crowbar with that He laid it on the white Formica breakfast bar, pulled a tiny spiral notebook from his back pocket, and asked her for her name and date of birth. She panicked for a second until she recollected that the birth dates were the same, Evon Miller's and hers.

"Probably kids," the cop said. "Doesn't look too professional, the way they went through that wall. Must have raised a racket Anything special they'd want with you?" She shook her head mutely. But his question unsettled her. Probably kids, she told herself. She asked if she could look around to see what was missing.

"TV's still there. Looks like most of the big stuff's in place. I must have scared them off. God knows what's in their pockets, though. You'll probably be finding stuff missing for days. But go ahead, look. Anything with some value could turn up in the North End. Be good to know about it." She walked through the apartment. The wreckage was upsetting. Every closet door was open. They'd gone through her bedroom with vicious speed, probably looking for jewelry. Her dresses were all off their hangers and on most of the garments the pockets had been turned inside out. A small jewelry box on her bureau had been upended, the pieces strewn around the room. She'd never know what was missing, but it was all costume stuff anyway that the Movers had provided. Even her bed had been disturbed, The spread and covers had been ripped off and the mattress now sat crookedly on the box spring. A routine hiding place, under the mattress, jokes notwithstanding. Probably kids, she told herself again.

When she went under, the Movers had given her the option of keeping her FBI credentials. It was a rainy-day measure, worse coming to worst. But if a snoopy boyfriend found them, well, most likely you were blown. That was how the leader, Dorville, had explained it. Agents who were undercover in the world of dope, of fencing, many of them held on to their creds, because they were likely to get arrested. But she didn't figure to have that need and she was relieved now she'd made the decision to leave them behind. Even her gun, much as she missed it, might have been a problem. She finally saw the logic.

She went back to the living room. The drawers had been pulled out on a small desk theme. She had been dictating today's 302 before she left, and she pawed around through what was on the floor, looking for her Dictaphone. It was gone, as well as the spare microcassettes that had been in the drawer beside it. To her best memory, there was not that much yet on the recording-the case file number, her voice referring to herself as ùndersigned agent.' Still, that cassette, in the wrong hands, would give her away.

"Anything gone?" called the copper.

"Hard to tell," she answered. There was so much disruption, so many odd things thrown here and there, that she knew the Dictaphone and the tapes could still be here. She picked through clothing, books, CDs on the floor. She went into the bedroom and systematically worked her way around the room. In the living room, she found the Dictaphone, but today's tape had been removed. Hoping, she checked her briefcase, but the microcassette was not in the side pouch where she routinely zipped the tape when she was done. Two inches by one, though, the cassette would be easy to miss. It was going to turn up, she told herself.

She walked around the apartment one more time, looking things over. Nothing else seemed to be missing. Then she realized that a birthday card she'd written to her mother, sealed in its white envelope and addressed, had also been removed from the desk. Fear darkly bloomed near her heart. She'd signed it 'DeDe.' Still, that was nothing, who'd make anything of DeDe? Only Marty Carmody, she realized. And Walter.