Rough Justice (13 page)

“Look, I just know it happened.”

“Uh huh.”

“Did he have any reason to be angry at me?”

“You were punching him in the throat, that might have annoyed him.”

“Had he heard of me?”

“I doubt it.”

“Did he read the
Star
?”

“Does anyone?”

“Was he afraid of something I might write?”

“You think he was an assassin for Literacy Volunteers?”

I took a drag of my cigarette. A long drag. Hers had burned down so she snapped up another and lit it off the first. I shifted from foot to foot, trying to work up the courage to start again. I felt like Holmes after round three with Tyson.

“I'm sorry to ask this, Mrs.… Ms. Morris.”

She tapped her foot impatiently.

“But I understand your husband used drugs at one time and I …”

“This, I take it, you get from St. Celia of the Open Mouth.” She nodded rapidly to herself. “Good. I like it. Great. Go on.”

“Could he have needed money? Could he have been robbing me?”

She snorted. Stuck a leg out, rested it on a cocked heel. “Well, on the one hand, we weren't as rich as we were before he took the road to Damascus. On the other hand, you've never heard of the road to Damascus, have you, so the reference is wasted. The operative point is that I work for a living myself, a very good living, in fact. Which left Thad free to traipse bountifully among the dispossessed. And anyway, if you were going to rob someone, would it be you? I mean, for one thing, look at your suit.” She shook her head at me. Turned and paced away from the windows, spun and paced toward the windows. She propped herself on the window seat and let her stockinged leg swing in and out. She chewed her gum at me slowly for a moment. She took a pull of smoke. It was hard to read her expression with the light from the sky behind her. Just as well.

“Listen,” I said. “I'm sorry I came here.”

“Yes, it was shitty of you, I must say.”

“Why did you let me in?”

“Curiosity. Why did you come?”

“Desperation. I don't really know where else to go. I didn't know your husband. I don't know why he was in my apartment. I don't know why he attacked me. I figured if there was some connection between us, you'd be the one to know what it was.”

She let out a short, sharp laugh. “Huh. That's what the cop said to me. Sleazy bastard, the cop. I'd actually like you better, if you hadn't murdered my husband. That's irony for you.” She hopped back down off the window, walked rapidly back to the coffee table. She wanted another cigarette. She got it, lit it off her last. “Anyway, you've all come to the wrong place. You should have gone to see Thad's father. Now, there's a man you could get along with. He had a theory about the case that could have helped you out a lot. When we were at the cemetery, laying the box with his son in it into the ground, know what he said to me? Leaned right over while the minister was speaking and said, ‘Knowing Thad, it was probably one of those fag things.'” Her eye-brows went up again. She smiled archly. “Like that? To his wife? At his funeral? A great man, Thad's father. A Lincoln. The answer to the musical question: What if Willy Loman had gotten a promotion? Sorry. Another play. After
Richard III
, before the
Mary Tyler Moore Show
.” She paced back and forth. “What was so crazy is, Thad thought he wanted to be just like him. For a while anyway. Not that he wanted to drink too much and disparage everyone who evinced any interest in anything besides money. But that is why he got his MBA, and why he got that Bennett-Dreiser job, too. He didn't like doing that shit, he never liked it. But he was going to be a big-time stockbroker. Mm hm, that'd make Dad proud. Except the only thing that ever made that asshole proud was fucking his chimpanzee of a mistress without getting caught. All he ever said to Thad was, ‘I guess people've gotta
buy
stocks, but why would anyone want to
sell
them?' Thank you, once again, Eric Reich. You virus.” Back and forth she went, faster and faster, her words coming faster too. “Anyone could tell Thad wasn't cut out for that life but, hell, who could say anything? I sure as hell couldn't. Then I'm a ball-buster, right? I mean, as if Thad didn't have enough worries in that department, he needs me telling him he's not big and tough enough to make it on Wall Street, that'd be perfect. I could've told him. Hell, I could've told him he was getting hooked on cocaine, too. But I'm not going to be his mother, forget it. Thank God he found Celia to boss him around, it's off my shoulders. I don't want any part of that. They can all run off together and find the meaning of life. Hey, some people need that. But I mean, I don't know why everyone couldn't just let him alone to be the way he was. Why does everyone have to be He-man all the time? I mean,
I
liked him fine. Hell,
I
loved him.”

She stopped pacing, ended the jag. Bowed her forehead to her cigarette hand. For a second, I thought she was gathering her thoughts. Then I heard her sob.

I stepped toward her. “Ms. Morris …”

“Get the fuck out of here.” She straightened, swiped angrily at her face with the heel of her palm. The mascara smeared across her cheek. “Are you having a good time? Just get the fuck out.”

I stopped. I nodded. “I'm sorry,” I said again. I walked to the door.

“Goddamn it,” I heard her mutter as I stepped into the hall. “
Goddamn
it.”

Then she said: “Oh!”

Then I heard her weeping.

13

The mist was still thick on the high towers of the city. The little rain had begun again. All the color seemed to be washed off the face of the buildings and the air drooped like an old willow. I could see it in the mirror behind the bar.

I was in a joint off St. Mark's Place. A weird little spot with weird little artworks hanging everywhere. Looked like crayon drawings shattered into bits, then repasted together. There were only a few people at the tables, young people mostly, dressed in black. There was a guy with spiked blond hair behind the bar. The mirror was behind him. I watched it. The dismal city came back to me from its glass.

I watched it over my Scotch. Sipping the sting off the top of the liquor, looking across its surface past my own reflection. Now and then I saw a car wash through the puddles on Second Avenue, leaving a spray behind. Other than that, it was motionless, colorless, gray.

I drank, forced the liquor down. My throat felt thick. Must have been the injury from the extension cord. Or the sound of Kathy Reich crying. One or the other. I could still feel the cut of the wire. I could still hear the crying.

I set my glass on the bar and lit a cigarette. The booze was starting to boil in me. It felt good. It seemed to be washing away my hangover a bit more every minute. My stomach was easing up. The throbbing in my head was slowing down. Even my eyes were starting to focus. I reached for the glass. My hands were still shaking. You can't have everything.

I drank and looked into the mirror again. What would Lansing say if she saw me here? It hurt my ears even to wonder. But I couldn't think of anywhere else to go. There were no more leads to check out, no angles to figure. Thad's wife had loved him, his fellow workers had. He hadn't needed money or been in a jam. No motive for theft, none for murder. Maybe he'd taken drugs for a while. Maybe his wife hadn't liked his employer. Maybe his father was an overbearing drunk. But all that was nothing, just a life. There had to be some link between his life and mine or else …

A
man is dead. You killed him. Someone …

Oh, shut up
, I thought.

I lifted the Scotch to my lips. I gazed into the mirror. Past my own reflection out at the gray avenue, the gray rain. Somewhere out there, Watts was working. Working hard, it sounded like. He'd already talked to Celia Cooper and Kathy Reich. Probably had a strong line on other friends, other angles. I smiled. He was probably doing more police work now than he had during all the rest of his career put together. Who could blame him? He had a real shot at me here. The D.A.'s office had let me go because the evidence supported my story. But if Watts could construct another story around the same evidence—or if he could construct new evidence—there'd be nothing to stop an indictment. That could mean jail right off, Rikers Island. Only the rich get bail for murder two, and if the paper suspended me, abandoned me, it could be a long mean time before I saw the light of day again. Months maybe. Maybe more than a year, maybe even …

When I set my drink on the bar this time, the sound of it made the kids at the tables turn. The Scotch washed over the glass's rim, spilled onto my hand, ran down. I wiped my dry lips with my palm. Stuffed my cigarette between them and drew on it hard, trying to steady myself.

“Another round?” the barkeep said.

“Yeah,” I said hoarsely. “Yeah.”

What difference does it make, Lancer?
I thought.
There's nowhere else to go
.

The barkeep laid a fresh shot in front of me. I lifted it eagerly. I stared across it into the mirror.

And the man in the battered hat stared back.

He was standing on the far side of the avenue. Standing in the thin rain, staring at the bar, at me. It was the same guy I'd seen back at Cooper House. The one who'd shot that angry look at Mark Herd. And it was the same guy—in the jolt of seeing him I remembered—it was the same guy who'd been asleep on the subway I'd taken downtown.

I lowered my drink again. He was following me.

I spun around on my chair. The moment I did, he shoved his hands in his pockets, bent his head, and started walking away.

I slapped some money on the bar. I grabbed my overcoat. I went out after him.

He was gone by the time I came out onto the sidewalk. I looked for him up and down the avenue. Bodegas, drugstores, newsstands. The zigzag of fire escapes on the face of brownstones. The dark of the rain. I clenched my teeth, my fists.

And there he was. A block away, moving fast. His head was still bent down under his hat, his hands were still shoved in the pockets of his worn suede coat. He glanced back at me once, then turned the corner into Ninth.

I stepped into the gutter, tried to cross Second. A sudden rush of cars slashed down on me along the wet street. I backed up onto the sidewalk, ran up toward the corner. I was breathless now, my lungs stinging.

Now, the traffic broke up a little. I tried again to dodge through. A cab hissed at me, its horn screamed. I saw its fender bear down, the rain spitting out from both front tires.

Then the cab was behind me and I was jumping up onto the far curb. I couldn't run anymore. It felt like dragging a truckload of cigarettes by a rope. I jogged the rest of the way up to Ninth and made the turn.

He was gone again. Nowhere in sight this time. I stood on the corner, scanning the street, the cool rain wetting my face, plastering my hair to me. I felt the hope draining away.

Come on
, I thought.
Come on
.

But there was nothing. On one side of the street, to my left, a wall of old brownstones faded from me, their stoops receding side by side into the mist. To my right, there was some kind of church, with an asphalt yard on one side of it and a burned-out brownstone on the other. The man in the battered hat could have gone in anywhere.

But my guess was the abandoned building. I headed along the sidewalk toward it.

In the rain, against the darkening gray, the brown-stone loomed blackly. A great skull, it looked like, the broken windows staring like empty eyes. The stoop was half-shattered. The door at the top of it opened into darkness. I started climbing the steps and met the sour smell of urine, the thick smell of rot, drifting down to me.

I stepped inside carefully. I was in the ruins of a foyer. A snake's nest of tangled wiring twisted out of the busted ceiling. The chipped walls were covered with unreadable graffiti. On the floor, in the rubble where the floor had been stripped away, there lay a kind of garden of glass vials. Some green, some red, some clear, most blackened somewhere by smoke. Large, dark roaches moved in and out of them. One vial tinkled as a water bug the size of my palm bumped into it.

A stairway of rich, heavy wood led up from me into nothing, into shadow. I stepped to it, vials rolling away from my feet, others crunching underneath them. I stepped onto the first rise. The whole structure wobbled. I stood still.

I peered up, into the dark. The stairway ended in the empty air. The top steps had fallen down. The last stair reached for the landing across a broad distance. I stepped back onto the floor.

There was a shuffling noise. I spun to it quickly. A rat was snouting the rubble at the side of the stairway. I gave a soft gag when I saw it. It was about the size of a football. When I turned to it, it paused. Looked back at me with faint interest. Its gelatinous belly shivered as it breathed. Its long tail lashed back and forth behind it.