The Death of All Things Seen (19 page)

‘My parents, they said again as they always did, “Ahmet the lawyer, ridiculous!” I was in a cap and gown and in a great amount of debt. All my parents wanted to know was what money I might have made if I had just worked and not studied and not married the gypsy. They were, of course, right, but money is not everything. Dignity and satisfaction count in ways that cannot be measured. They could not appreciate it. You stop learning, or your understanding of the world ends at a certain point. I was their son, and not their son. I became a married man, a husband, a father, and then a lawyer. My father, regrettably, he remained all his life a goat herder, or, more tragically, an ex-goat herder, and my mother, the wife of an ex-goat herder. It takes a generation perhaps. I believe this. They had found the courage to leave, but the language was a great obstacle. In the end, I broke free and had my own life. It is the same already with my sons, and now my grandsons. It begins with the music they listen to. That is how you know when life has passed you by.’

In this appraisal, there was a connected sense of why Mr Ahmet was here, that it connected to a view of parents, or it was the best Norman could assess. He simply waited.

*

It wasn’t established why so much information had been gathered in the box related to Walter’s suicide and his killing of his wife. There could be no case, and yet it was evident a great deal of time had been given to establishing a timeline related to Walter’s last day alive. The writing was all the same hand, a looping cursive. Norman understood in viewing it that this had been Mr Ahmet’s work alone.

Mr Ahmet set the glasses around his eyes again. He was more direct. He began with a review of Helen’s movements on the day of the accident, captured in still photographs by a series of street cameras. Both Helen and Walter’s cars were circled.

Mr Ahmet pointed. In a photograph, Helen’s car was in the turn lane. Then, she pulled out again. ‘You see, how she changed her mind.’

Helen, at that point, was ten minutes from her appointment. She had been charged for the no-show at the appointment. ‘Office policy,’ Mr Ahmet said, without looking up.

There was testimony, too, regarding what happened much later at the hospital. Mr Ahmet sifted through folders in the box. He produced a piece of paper. A nurse had spoken with Walter minutes before he went into Helen’s room. She described him as in deep shock. A security camera shot caught Walter buying coffee from a vending machine. Nothing indicated what would happen minutes later.

Mr Ahmet set the shot back with other photographs. He took out another folder. After the original trial and acquittal, the District Attorney’s office had continued following Walter and the others. There had been talk of money being spent extravagantly. Corruption was endemic. It was the order of business, how the city was organized. Extortion rackets were generally accepted.

Mr Ahmet leaned forward again. He said pointedly, ‘Nothing was linked directly to Walter, but it emerged that Helen had purchased a fur coat for over two thousand dollars. She had paid in cash.’

Mr Ahmet thumbed through the invoices. ‘The coat triggered a deeper inquiry, challenging the veracity of sworn testimony and alibis as provided by Walter and the other officers in the original case. The families of the two victims got the support of a bombastic community activist preacher who challenged the impartiality of the judiciary. A young district attorney with rising ambitions entered the picture. Suspicions were aroused about Walter. This was the underbelly of how the system worked. It was known and accepted, and then, of course, it wasn’t. Times change, Mr Price.’

Mr Ahmet stopped for a moment in the quiet assessment of the statement.

He began again. He had interviewed Helen at the time. She had refused to explain how she had come to spend more than $28,000 over a number of years at a variety of upscale stores. Much of the evidence gathered was from sales clerks who were familiar with Helen. She had a reputation for being disdainful and for always paying with cash.

Helen had despised Mr Ahmet. She had called Mr Ahmet an ant.

In her non-cooperation, Mr Ahmet conceded, ‘It was, of course, the most indelicate of situations. I approached Walter with what I felt was at issue. There was a witness at the company where Helen worked who suggested improprieties and favors gained between certain parties. There was allegedly an affair going on between your mother and her boss, Mr Feldman. Walter ended up shouting at me. It could not be discussed. It was difficult terrain to navigate. It was so very complicated, Mr Price. Your father was a friend of mine.’

Mr Ahmet shook his head at the memory of it. ‘I will tell you, I sided with your father always, because there was, in fact, systematic extortion going on in the South Side, and I thought, “Let it be uncovered in another way and not mixed up sorting the wheat from the chaff of Walter Price’s personal life.” What I can tell you, in looking back on it, your parents, they were preoccupied with a crisis in their own lives, and quite beyond the reach of reason. Regrettably, when two drowning people are locked in a struggle, inevitably, they will take each other under. Both will die.’

Mr Ahmet was quiet a moment. He then came back to certain points like a lawyer at the end of a long trial. He laid out a sequence of shots taken from camera footage along Lake Shore, essential to establishing a better understanding of Helen’s emotional state. Walter’s unmarked car was seen with its lights flashing. Helen was just a car ahead of him.

A magnified series of shots showed her head turn, looking back before she abruptly changed lanes and advanced across the six lanes of Lake Shore Drive. Her foot had not, as was initially theorized, inadvertently slipped in a moment of confusion from the brake to the accelerator pedal. Helen had deliberately changed lanes.

Mr Ahmet pointed, the steering wheel turned in a hand-over-hand manner. It was caught on a sequence of shots, the deliberateness of her action.

Helen Price had actively attempted suicide.

Mr Ahmet gathered the files like a dealer gathering a fold of cards at the end of a long deal. He said, without looking up, ‘Maybe, sometimes the secrets we withhold reveal more about us than what we ever say. It is perhaps better understood by greater minds. Maybe you can say it better, Mr Price. I am simply a gatherer of evidence.’

His smile was consolatory. As for Norman’s laundry list of judicial infractions, it had been discussed with a number of authorities in a position to advocate on Norman’s behalf. Norman could plead to a series of misdemeanors, and serve a two-year probation on the drugs charge with the guarantee that all associated criminal records would be expunged if he stayed clean. The deal had been vetted through the District Attorney’s Office. They were amenable to the terms proposed, cognizant of Walter’s service. The entire family had been under undue pressure.

There was, however, the aggravating and regrettable circumstance of a Mr Kenneth Caudill. Mr Ahmet proceeded. ‘Apparently, this Mr Caudill called Mr Einhorn in the early hours this morning. The FBI had an injunction to tap Mr Einhorn’s phone. There are incriminating remarks, possibly a count of blackmail. I have not read the transcript.’

Mr Ahmet clarified the situation. ‘It will, of course, be established it was not Mr Caudill who killed Mr Einhorn. As I told you, Mr Einhorn and his father-in-law were going to be indicted, but it is an unfortunate coincidence that Mr Caudill did call. The police, they will get to the bottom of it, I am sure, of why he called.’

There was the charged sense in so saying it that Mr Ahmet already knew Norman had gotten word to Kenneth about his arrest. Joanne’s call from Norman’s phone to Kenneth would surface, if it had not already.

Norman advanced no explanation. It would have demanded too long an explanation and an admission of guilt in having sent the original letter to Daniel Einhorn. He remained silent.

Procedurally, there were terms of the agreement to be formalized, papers to be signed. Mr Ahmet would take care of it. Norman could expect to be out before the hour.

There was also the issue of the box. Norman felt the compunction to do the decent thing, and, clearing his voice, he settled his hand on the box and said, ‘I might yet make something of all this if you wouldn’t mind?’

Mr Ahmet was accommodating, agreeable and generous in his comment. ‘You might yet write something great, Mr Price.’ In rising he moved the box slightly, so it was closer to Norman.

Amidst the exchange, Mr Ahmet called out to the guard and, turning again, said quietly, ‘They will have the box up front. It is for legal reasons, you understand.’

He was then gone and so suddenly.

W
HEN
JOANNE
WENT
to the jail, a Cook County clerk told her that Norman had already been released, and then wouldn’t tell her anything more.

Joanne checked her voicemail immediately. There was no message. In the echoing vault of the courthouse around her were prosecutors, defenders and witnesses. At the entrance was an airport-style security in full operation, voices echoing in the municipal vault of the tall ceilings. It added to the confusion in her head.

In her manic state, Joanne checked again with the clerk, who then asked her to produce ID and state her relationship with the accused.

Joanne turned and walked away.

*

The day had turned to a mixture of snow and sleet, a continuation of the same cold front that had descended the previous afternoon. Throughout the early morning, on no sleep, Joanne had trawled in a cab for a
Check-into-Cash
outlet to advance money against her credit card so she might have sufficient funds to make Norman’s bail.

Joanne stood looking out on the street at a clutch of immigrant drivers talking among themselves. She held Grace’s hand. They had argued, Grace defiant and tired. She had demanded a McDonald’s. Grace looked at Joanne with hardened determination. She said, ‘I want Daddy!’

Joanne was on the verge of tears. She said, ‘We’re going to find him, okay?’

Grace was still dressed in the same godawful outfit from yesterday. She looked like something from a pervert’s wet dream.

The sky opened in a stinging sleet as they clambered into the furnace of a taxi. The driver hit the meter without acknowledging Joanne. She gave the address, toppling back into the seat as the car lurched forward.

The driver had a single ear bud in his ear. Joanne felt his eyes in the mirror locked on her, then he looked away. He was talking about her to someone in Iran, calls a cent a minute, detailing the great damnation of what he was forced to do here in Chicago, USA, drive this woman, who had committed a multitude of sins against Allah that would see her flogged or beheaded under Sharia law.

Joanne was determined to get through this, to make it back to the house without crying, and then, in thinking of not crying, she was crying. She raised her hand up to her face and turned to the window to hide her tears from Grace.

*

Joanne had not been honest with Norman about the reasons she had left home.

It had begun with Dave when she had lacked the perspective or insight to even process what was then happening. She squeezed her eyes shut. She would blank the world out, and yet it was alive in her head, all that had happened, and how it had happened. It accounted for why she was here now in this cab. She believed it.

Six months after Dave had started dating Sheryl, he had begun picking Joanne up from band practice so Joanne didn’t have to take the late bus, an ingratiating kindness to get in with the family. Sheryl had endorsed it, promoting Dave’s big brother familiarity, Dave arming himself against Dad and all his resistance.

Joanne was a pawn in the conspiracy of their love.

Dave had always had an over-familiarity about him. She should have seen it. He wasn’t as stupid as he seemed. This is what groomers did. They talked about it on daytime TV, the obvious signs: Dave sitting at the kitchen table with a tall glass of milk and peanut butter sandwiches, talking to ‘Jo’, a name she hated that further made her less a woman and just a kid and incited her in the way someone like Dave better understood; Dave making it his business to be out in the open in his dealings with Jo.

This was again how a groomer groomed. She hardly showed in her chest. She was conscious of a slow change that could not come fast enough. She was her own worst enemy. She stuffed with cotton wool. Sheryl made a point to tell Dave this, because Sheryl was a bitch, and her gain always had to be Joanne’s loss. These were the trenches of family life, of sibling rivalry. Dave, in taking Jo under his wing, was seen to be seeking a mediating peace.

He took Jo out for a sundae at a roadside ice-cream parlor. He was sympathetic and not given to taking sides. They would work it out between them. Jo was a rare beauty and he told her the story of the ugly duckling, which should have raised five alarm bells about his intentions, but he knew what she wanted to hear. There was any number of things a person could say to another person in a shared intimacy that could never, or would never, be repeated in the light of day.

Who didn’t love Dave? Dave, familiar and funny! Dave, all hands, taking the truck the long way home, wresting the last of good fortune from an Indian summer, because he loved drives and aloneness, something he revealed as he stopped smiling, which suggested suddenly a greater depth of understanding and caring. He had the power to see in Joanne’s heart. She understood, in looking back on it, how it happened.

He had money in rolls and paid at a small window at what was ostensibly a summer shack for hot dogs and ice cream – Dave, licking his thumb, peeling off notes, and Jo on a picnic table in the last of what had been a long hot summer of first awakenings. He was a loser if she had looked close enough. She hadn’t. He incited an underlying pathology and fear in younger kids. He was the Fonz in that arrested state of early manhood, come of age early, when there were kids with acne and no facial hair, or no hair where there would be hair eventually, and Dave made it known, pushed his advantage. He was a bully, and maybe understood already, that, in the long run, these lesser kids would eventually run his life and make it a misery.