The Intruder (22 page)

A voice calls Dr. Wadhwa’s name over the public address system and he looks distracted. For some reason, John G. finds himself fixating on the way the doctor has his lab coat fastidiously buttoned up. Not like American-born doctors letting theirs flap open casually. This guy doesn’t take one button for granted.

“So that’s it?” says John G.

“Yes, that’s it.”

He feels angry. Cheated. A side of him won’t accept this. He’s been ready to welcome death with open arms. Everybody dies, Daddy. He hears Shar’s voice so clearly she could be sitting on his lap. He should be dead now. He should be with her. He could
have saved her when the light turned green. She died in his arms. The guilt of being alive is like a heavy stone on his chest.

The doctor rubs his forehead and checks his watch. “I must say, Mr. Gates. I’m somewhat surprised by your attitude. In the part of the world I come from, millions of people die of disease and hunger. Yet you’ve been given the gift of life and you don’t seem the least bit moved by it.”

John G. stares down at his hands. “I just need time to adjust, I guess.”

“May I ask you something?” Wadhwa swivels in his chair.

“What?”

“Are you taking any medication for your . . . ?” He makes a vague circling motion next to his head.

John G. takes out the amber Haldol bottle and rattles it at him. Just two or three pills left. He didn’t think he’d be needing much more.

The doctor takes the bottle and studies the prescription on the side. “You might want to stop upstairs and get this refilled.”

He hands the bottle back and reaches into his pocket for a card. “I’d like to make one other suggestion.”

“What’s that?”

“I know that some of the homeless people we see at the clinic go on to a place called the Interfaith Volunteers Center on the Upper West Side. I thought I’d give you the address if you were interested.” He hands over the card.

John G. takes it without looking at it. He’s too busy staring at the pictures of the babies on the wall. Black ones, white ones, brown ones, yellow ones; some old enough to walk, others newly born. Right now, he feels like one of them. Reborn here in this grubby old hospital, surrounded by the sick and the dying, people who deserve a second chance far more than he does. But it isn’t the pink-and-white cooing kind of birth. It’s more like being wrenched from a warm, dark, comfortable place and forced out into a bright, frightening world where nothing is certain.

“Congratulations.” The doctor stands and offers his hand. “You may have another thirty or forty years ahead of you.”

“And what am I supposed to do with them?” says John G.

33

How you doing, Mrs. Schiff? My name’s Philip Cardi. I’ve been doing some work for your husband.”

It’s eight-thirty at night. Jake is upstairs, making a phone call. Philip stands on the front stoop, grinning through the bars of the front gate.

“Oh yes, he’s told me.”

“Mind if I come in?”

Dana gets the key and lets him in.

Philip steps into the foyer and gives her a long once-over twice. She blushes slightly and leads him into the living room.

“So you’re the psychiatrist, right?”

“Psychiatric social worker.”

He gestures like he’s taking off his hat to her. “It’s wonderful your husband lets you work.”

She crosses her arms. “Well, it’s not so much that he lets me work,” she says, shifting her weight from foot to foot. “It’s that I choose to work.”

“Yeah, I guess you can do that if you’re not home raising children.”

He takes a blue glass pitcher off the credenza and looks at the bottom of it. Why is he making her so uncomfortable? She wonders. It’s not just the long rude stare. It’s a certain arrogance, almost a sense of entitlement as he moves through their living room, picking things up and examining them.

“So why is it that you’re coming by so late, Mr. Cardi?”

“Your husband and I, we have some unfinished business to discuss.”

His smile feels like fingers on her face, probing into places where they don’t belong. She doesn’t want to be alone with him anymore.

“Jake!” She calls up the stairs. “You have a visitor!”

Philip puts down the pitcher and starts flipping through a coffee table book about African art. “You ever hear about the things these guys do to their women? How they cut them?” He makes a tut-tut sound as he turns the page. “Right in the privates, so they can’t experience pleasure.”

“Women have it tough all over,” she says stiffly.

“It’s sick. That’s what it is. A bunch of savages mutilating each other.”

Jake comes thumping down the stairs, wearing pinstriped trousers and a white shirt from work with the tie undone. When he sees Philip, his eyes become slits and his mouth hardens.

“Honey, can you give us a couple of minutes?”

“Sure,” says Dana, looking uneasily from her husband to Philip. “Holler if you need anything.”

She goes bounding up the stairs and Philip watches her gray sweat bottoms and bare feet disappear along the landing.

“She’s a real piece of ass, your wife,” he says. “I sure hope you know what to do with her, Jake.”

“What the hell do you want?”

“I still want that school contract for the asbestos work. You thought any more about that?”

“I think I told you to go fuck yourself. Isn’t that the way we left it?”

Philip whistles and puts the African art book down on the Mies van der Rohe glass coffee table. “Well, that’s not a very lawyerly thing to say, is it?”

“You get out of my house.”

“Hey, your wife invited me in. Maybe she saw something she liked.”

The fraudulent neon smile again. How could Jake have allowed
himself to be taken in so easily by this fake macho camaraderie? Hey, Brooklyn is Brooklyn. He realizes now the whole thing was some kind of setup. He should’ve known better. He’s represented dozens of criminal defendants just like Philip. But this time he let himself be blinded. He’s sometimes told himself he’d give up his own eyes to protect his family; now he’s done it.

“I’m giving you a choice,” he says to Philip, circling in close enough to smell his aftershave. “You can leave now or I’ll call the police.”

“Oh the police!” Philip throws up his hands and thrusts out his lower lip. “That would be something! I think I’d like to talk to the police. I might have some interesting stories for them about something that happened the other night under Riverside Park. I think they call that felony murder, what you did. They take your license for that, don’t they?”

“I didn’t do anything, Philip. You swung the bat.”

“Yeah, who’s your witnesses? The homeless guy from the subways? Gates? He’s dead. Remember?”

“If it’s your word against mine, I know who they’re going to believe.”

Philip’s face reddens. “You try turning me in and I’ll bring this whole fucking house down on your head.”

Jake takes a quick glance up toward the top of the stairs to see if Dana or Alex have been standing there listening. But there’s just a white plastic garbage bag waiting to be taken out.

He takes another step and goes chest-to-chest with Philip. “Now you listen to me,” he says quietly. “I don’t knuckle under to you or anybody else. Understand? My friendship with Bob Berger is not for sale and my wife’s ass is not for your eyes.”

“I think you’re forgetting who you’re talking to,” says Philip, pulling his shoulders back and drawing himself up to his full height.

“No, I know who I’m talking to. I’m talking to a guy who committed the actual murders the other night. So before he starts talking about somebody else, he’s going to have to talk about what he did and then go to jail. They don’t do much plea bargaining with murder two cases.”

Philip’s pretense of a smile is gone. All Jake sees before him is a weak chin and a soft forehead. And in an instant, he knows he probably could have taken Philip in a fair fight. Again, he’s flushed with guilt for not having done more to stop things the other night.

“You must figure you’re a pretty good poker player, huh, Counselor?”

“You get out of my house and you stay away from my office.”

“What if I call bullshit on you?”

“Try it,” says Jake, remembering what Philip said to Abraham in the tunnel.

“Maybe I will.” Philip smiles and bows, as if he’s just received a bit of thoughtful advice. “Kiss your wife good-bye for me.”

Once more, Jake has to hold himself back from throwing the first punch. Rage is bubbling up inside him like carbolic acid. Philip stops to look at the framed Ben Shahn
PEACE
poster on the wall and then moves toward the front door.

“It’s all right, I’ll let myself out,” he says. “You gave me the keys. Remember?”

34

Back upstairs in his study, Jake closes the door and picks up the telephone.

“Andy, it’s Jake again,” he tells his lawyer’s voice mail. “I’m going crazy here. You gotta let me know what’s going on with this case or tell me to get another lawyer. My balls are in a vise, buddy.”

That makes twelve calls in the last five days and he still hasn’t heard back from Andy. There hasn’t been anything in the newspapers either. Not bad news, but not necessarily good news either. He wonders if there’s some problem with the police. Of course, he could just pick up the phone himself and volunteer to tell the cops what happened.

I was involved in a couple of homicides.

Oh really? Hope you got a good lawyer. Murder two in New York State can carry a sentence of twenty-five to life.

But you see, officer, I didn’t know that’s what was going to happen. I thought we were just going to throw a scare into a guy.

Oh yeah? Who’d you think you were going with, Mother Teresa? You were going to give these bums a civics lecture? Sure you were. Come on, Counselor, you’re a shrewder judge of character than that. Aren’t you?

He hangs up the phone and tries to lose himself, channel surfing with the TV remote control. MTV bodies writhing. Pesos
plummeting on the business channel. A film clip of Hakeem Turner slam-dunking on some hapless Phoenix Sun player. A televangelist talking damnation. Then on Channel 16, a familiar fuzzy head and a set of bushy eyebrows against an artificial New York skyline backdrop. His lawyer Andy Botwin is holding forth on some cable call-in program.

“What I’m saying, Bill, is that my client cannot expect to get a fair trial because he’s a succesful person living in America,” he intones, waving a finger in the air. “He’s being punished for playing the game too well...”

For a split second, Jake feels a surge of panic: is Andy discussing his case on national TV?

“There’s too much prejudice in the air.” Andy goes on, propping that thoughtful fist against his chin. “A jury of his peers should have at least one or two people familiar with the world of entertainment...”

Good. It’s one of his other cases. Calm down, Jake tells himself. You haven’t been charged with anything. Yet.

35

Philip is stuck in a line of cars outside the Midtown Tunnel. A matchstick-thin homeless guy with a mop of wild filthy hair stumbles up with a squeegee and offers to wash his windshield.

“Get the fuck away from me, ya hairy puke.” Philip reaches for the aluminum bat still in the backseat.

The bum backs away, as if he’d somehow divined Philip’s history just by looking at his face.

The light changes and Philip drives on fuming into the long tunnel under the river. Bums. Niggers. Spies. Faggots. Jews. Women. He truly hates this fucking city.

For a few minutes tonight, he thought he might finally be able to conquer it. If only he could have worked things out with this lawyer Schiff and the contracts, whole new vistas could have opened up. From the school asbestos deal, he could have moved on to bigger projects: more school construction, bridges, roads, civic centers, and then on into the private sector. He’d pictured himself subcontracting superstores for Bob Berger, hotels, skyscrapers. The day would come when he’d be able to stand on a rooftop, look out at the horizon, and calculate the amount of money he’s owed for each building on the skyline. He would become ... a player.

Instead of just being a meatball collecting debts for his ungrateful uncle.

Emerging from the tunnel and heading out onto the Long Island Expressway, he turns on the radio and starts punching through stations. He’s meant for better things, he decides, but the odds in life have always been stacked against him. He’s never gotten the respect he’s deserved. Not from the college loan officers, giving all the breaks to the nigs and spics after he got his discharge from the army. Not from the guards and the other shit birds on his cell block when he went away. Not from Carmine, and especially not from his wife and kids.

“Make way for the homo superior!” a song on the radio bleats.

Philip punches in another station, still not exactly sure what he wants. He drives past the old World’s Fair grounds and a plane from Kennedy roars overhead, a red streak through the night. Why has he always felt so trapped and held down? He’s never been sure why he got married in the first place. The dirty little secret is that the first time he really felt turned on as a teenager was seeing Little Joe stripped to the waist and getting whipped over a wagon wheel on
Bonanza.

That certainly didn’t make him a faggot, but it could be that he’s just one of those guys who never should have gotten hitched in the first place. Instead he let his uncle and his mother pressure him into marrying Nita, a mousy little girl from the old neighborhood with stringy hair and thick glasses. Of course, he could never really make it with her. In bed, it was like trying to put a wet noodle through a keyhole.

When she’d ask him what was the matter, it got him furious. What right did she have, implying there was something wrong with him? Yeah, he had to smack her around a little. He was the man in the house. It was his biological imperative. Of course, when he tried to exercise that imperative with other women he couldn’t get hard most of the time either. But that was because of all the pressure he was under from his uncle and the rest of them. He had to think of Little Joe and the fucking wagon wheel just so he could get hard enough to get Nita pregnant the two times.