The Company You Keep (11 page)

I could see Billy’s cheeks reddening just slightly under his beard. He answered in a straightforward voice, though.

“I didn’t invite Sharon to come here. She came unannounced. And I didn’t have any—any—way of knowing that the FBI would be doing a black-bag job on my house. What, they exhume J. Edgar Hoover for this?”

“They had a warrant, Mr. Cusimano.”

“Listen, kid. First of all, Mr. Cusimano was my father, who ran a greengrocery in Brooklyn. Second of all, as for their warrant: that warrant’ll stand up in court for about seven seconds. That doesn’t matter one bit, though, ’cause they’ve already done what they set out to. My lawyer says they wiped out my whole prosecution with that warrant. A blatantly illegal search warrant.”

“Your lawyer,” I answered right away. “So that’s why Sharon came. To meet him?”

“No. He refused even to meet her.”

It was funny. This guy, I could see he wasn’t stupid. To the contrary, he was evidently an extremely smart man. And yet I had gotten him in less than three minutes. I let the pace slow a little, now, by lighting a cigarette.

“Really? Why’s that? Isn’t this Grant’s kind of case? I mean, the most fundamental issues of the lefty pantheon, I would have thought.”

Now he seemed to be taking me a little more seriously, squinting at me through the sun and speaking in a lower tone.

“Listen, Sharon came here looking for a way to surrender herself. If she’d been able to do it, she’d have at least had a little control over her life. Now she’s facing spending the rest of her days in jail. If you had any part in that, then feel bad.”

“And why do I feel bad about someone complicit in the murder of a policeman going to jail?”

But his answer surprised me. Less for what he said than for the tone in which he said it, which was not mad but sad. “Complicit? Complicity’s a big word, boy. For example, what are you, right now, complicit in?”

I thought about that. Then: “I don’t know. You tell me.”

“Nah.” Cusimano was turning already. “You wouldn’t believe me.”

“Wait. What are you talking about?”

“That’s your job. Go figure it out.”

But he didn’t turn, speaking as he walked away.

“Mr. Cusimano. Bill. Stop.”

Now he turned and shook his head slowly. “No. You’re not going to listen to me. Kids never do. See, it’s our parents’ revenge on us.”

“But it’s my job to listen.”

“Yeah, that’ll be the day. I’ll tell Jim to expect you. Take 23A down to Palenville, your car doesn’t look like it’ll weather 16.”

And after watching Billy Cusimano walk—or rather waddle—away, I went back to my car and started down 23A to Palenville. I knew the way to Saugerties, and I didn’t need Cusimano here to tell me my car couldn’t make it down 16.

And I guess I knew that your father was the next logical person for me to talk to.

What I didn’t know was why Billy Cusimano’s tone was so hopeless.

Like I was about to do something very bad to someone who didn’t deserve it, and if I only understood why, I too would be sad.

Okay? That good enough for you, J? It’s like two in the morning, and I’m just sending this now, so you got to figure you’ll be up at least another half an hour reading, right? Well, when you finish, reflect on this: you woulda gotten this story four hours ago, except you pissed me off so much with your incessant IMs and phone calls that I went out to dinner just to get you back. So in the future, you just remember: you don’t like the way I’m telling Isabel this story? Then tell her yourself.

So now it’s Tuesday, for Christ sake, and thanks to Benny’s nonsense I fell asleep before I even got his e-mail last night, or I should say, this morning.

About time someone takes that boy out back and shoots him.

Then, I’m that annoyed, I can’t get myself to sit down to work on this, which is making me feel a little desperate because it’s already the sixth of June, and we’re on, like, day two of this story. So listen up, all of you—from now on we write faster, smoother, and sleeker. I mean everybody, and especially you, Benny, you little shithead.

I, for one, am going to cut to the chase. So it’s Monday, the day, come to think of it, just a week or two shy of ten years ago when I was first annoyed by the little shithead, I mean Benny. My business that morning was a bail hearing on a court-assigned hit-and-run case, a young man whose conviction, I’m sorry to say, I was going to overturn on technical grounds to do with probable cause. Sorry, because the little bastard had been drunk as a lord when he left the Ace of Spades in Palenville and promptly plowed into a minivan containing six adolescents from the Harriman Lodge, putting four of them in the hospital. In my opinion, he deserved a harsh and punitive sentence, which perhaps wasn’t a very good attitude for a defense lawyer. And worse yet, he wasn’t going to get it, because the arresting officer had violated the little asshole’s constitutional rights. The way I looked at it, it was the arresting officer who should have been on trial.

I was going to do what I had to. But I wasn’t going to be happy about it, and in fact, when the hearing was finished and the irate judge had recessed
until the afternoon—yet another member of the Judicial Friends of Jim Grant Club—I didn’t have the heart to go back to the office. Instead, I walked over to have an early lunch with you and Molly. When that was done, and you had gone out to play in the yard with Kate Carlucci from next door, was when Billy called on my cell to tell me to expect a visit from an
Albany Times
reporter. That was not unexpected, but it was still a major blow, and I guess how major a blow could be seen on my face, for Molly, turning from the window, frowned and said, “Now what’s up with you, Little J?”

“Ummm…” I put a hand through what I liked to call my hair, my eyes closed, and rested like this a moment. “This reporter from the
Albany Times
. He’s been to see Billy, now he’s coming here.”

Molly answered this one more softly. “That’s not bad news, J, that’s good news.”

“And how do you make this good news?” My eyes were still closed.

“Oh, come on. You needed to get proactive sooner or later. They’re going to smear you with this Sharon Solarz thing and eat you up in court. You tell this reporter the truth about Julia and her father and get it over with.”

I could have cried. Even Molly had no idea how impossible that was. She knew my secrets, but she didn’t even imagine Bob Montgomery’s. I mean, how the hell could I have told her that? And without knowing that: the truth? Ha ha ha. But what I said was: “Okay, I know.”

“But you’re not going to do it, are you?”

“I don’t know.”

“I don’t understand you.” Molly spoke calmly, as if to inject a note of reason into madness—quite a frequent tone of hers with me. “You have to do it, you know.”

I nodded, as much as my head in my hands permitted, but I didn’t say anything. I couldn’t. So I nodded, and didn’t say anything, and after a moment she spoke more gently.

“Can I help?”

“You already have. And are.”

“Uh-huh.” She came close now and put a hand on my shoulder, a gesture of companionship that struck me, at the time, as infinitely sexy.

“Come on, J. I know you don’t want to assassinate your ex-wife in the papers. I admire you. But now’s not the time for ideals. Izzy needs you. She needs to stay with you. With
us.
”

“Okay.” I was just shutting her up now. Her hand on my shoulder was unbearable, unbearable, and I wanted it never to move.

“Good. Get going now, boy. And remember what my father used to say.”

“What was that?” Willing her hand to stay put, to just stay put.

“That your problems aren’t likely to go away just because you forget about them for a few minutes.”

Her father. In those days, whenever someone my age mentioned their father, I felt like crying. As if, now that all our parents were dying, mine was a whole generation in mourning, still shocked by the ridiculous truth that our parents could be taken away forever. I lifted her hand to my cheek and shut my eyes. And then her hand was gone, and I was a grown man again, not a child, even though while I was walking out the door my heart was in my mouth.

2.

Do you remember my assistant, Izzy? Michael Joseph Rafferty Jr.? Works for Hillary now? He was this kid who came to me straight out of Exeter, Princeton, Yale Law School; drives up to my single-room office in Saugerties when the rest of his class is out doing tequila shots and lines to celebrate their first jobs at Chase Manhattan, or Salomon Smith Barney, or Bear Stearns; asks to work for Jim Grant, unpaid. Friday afternoon, not hours after graduation.

I say, You shitting me? You turn right around and don’t stop until you’ve got a forty-thousand-dollar-a-year entry-level job in New York.

But this kid is not going anywhere.

“Mr. Grant, there’s the strongest economy in thirty years in New York. I published in
Yale Law Journal
first year, and my starting offers, for your information, run into the low sixes. You think I’m turning that down on a whim?”

“Don’t call me Mr. Grant. Go intern for Ron Kuby, then.”

“No way. Case by case, you’re doing more interesting work up here than anyone in New York.” The kid was actually unpacking his briefcase as he spoke. “I’m staying right here.”

And so he had. It had been two years now he’d been working for me, and we’d even expanded into a second funky little office in the horrible little suite above the Saugerties Center antique store, and he’d been so good I had to pay him a few bucks of Julia’s money, first, and now of Billy’s. Mikey. He’ll be at the parole board, and you’ll see him there—if you go. When I first paid him, it was in cash. For a moment he looked truly downcast, poor kid: this was far from what he had bargained for when he decided to go idealistic. Then he brightened up and said: “Hey, Mr. Grant, tell you what. Fire me, I’ll get unemployment and work off the books. I could go as high as the low five figures this year!”

Now, coming upstairs at 9:15, I found Mikey and the kid from the
Times
, Ben Schulberg, sitting in his office, Mikey chatting merrily—as if the whole world were his friend—and the kid from the
Times
clearly noting every word.

I kicked Mikey out and put the kid in the client’s chair on the other side of the desk, facing the morning sun. In the light, I had the time to see that my persecutor had a long face and aviator glasses that looked out of the seventies, nice looking without being anything that could be called handsome. It was, I saw right away, a face that inspired confidence, which is, depending on the circumstance, either a dangerous or an admirable quality for a reporter. Admirable when he’s after someone else; dangerous when he’s after you. He wore a white shirt, sleeves rolled up to show thin forearms, a badly tied tie, and khakis, and sat with his hands loosely clenched between his knees.

“Mr. Grant, can you confirm that you were consulted by Sharon Solarz on the day of her arrest last week?”

That was an easy one. I did not have to feign the bitterness in my answer. “Why should I? You already printed it.”

“I printed that she met with a ‘public interest’ lawyer in Saugerties. Not that she met with you.”

At that, I reached over to pick up the phone book from where I had it
filed on the floor, then tossed it onto the surface of the desk so it slid over a few layers of paper and into his lap, carrying the papers with it.

“There are thirty-nine lawyers in Saugerties. Thirty-eight do accidents, thirty-eight do deeds, thirty-eight do closings. Then there’s me. Now, who did you say she met with? Asshole.” That last word I improvised, though I admit that I had rehearsed the first ones after Billy called saying Ben was on his way. A short silence followed the question, while we glowered at each other. I, personally, felt I had made a point. So I pressed on.

“So, Benny. Someone’s been leaking you information. Who?”

The answer was automatic. “I protect sources, Mr. Grant. If you were a source, I’d protect you.”

“Yeah, yeah.” I let my eye steal to some papers on the desk, then up again, like I was bored by him. “The difference is that your sources are violating the law by speaking to you. You understand, don’t you, that you’re being used?”

“I suppose.” Ben answered carefully, and in his answer I saw that he had done his homework. “You mean that since Sharon Solarz’s arrest the FBI’s leaking information to the press in the hope of flushing Mimi Lurie and Jason Sinai out. Like they did with Kathleen Soliah from the Symbionese Liberation Army, feeding info to
America’s Most Wanted.
I’m sure that’s true. That’s not my problem, though. My job is to learn what I can, and it’s constitutionally guaranteed. So I’m planning to keep doing what I’m doing, Mr. Grant, and just so there’s no misunderstanding, this conversation is on the record now.”

Leaning first downward into his briefcase, then forward, Ben placed a tape recorder on the desk and turned it on.

“Don’t call me Mr. Grant,” I answered automatically, thinking, not many kids his age knew the FBI used the media in that way. Not many kids his age, I thought, knew who Mimi Lurie and Jason Sinai were. Looking back, I saw that the kid had a box of Marlboro Reds in his shirt pocket. Not many kids his age, I thought, smoked. Finally, I went on.

“Well, here’s something on the record for you, Benny. The wire they had recording Billy Cusimano’s business was illegal. Get it? They gave up their whole marijuana case on Cusimano for this, and they know it—all
they’ve done is issue a bench warrant for Cusimano for cultivating. I’ll have it thrown out of court next week. But Sharon Solarz is still in custody, and there’s no doubt at all that they developed an alternate chain of evidence to defend that arrest in court.”