The Intruder (31 page)

Carmine puts his right hand over Philip’s left hand and squeezes until it hurts.

“All I’m telling you is I’m holding you responsible for anything that happens to Ronnie,” he says in a low middle-of-the-night voice. “You’re my nephew. But if you cause me suffering, I’ll make sure you never forget it.”

Under the table, he pushes his knee hard against Philip’s thigh.

“How’s Nita?” He draws back his chair and stands up.

Philip hesitates, wondering if Carmine’s heard about him moving out. Is this a test to see what kind of liar he is? He feels the disgrace of a man without a family.

“You know.” Philip shrugs. “Women.”

“Yeah, I know.” Carmine chucks him under the chin. “Bring the kids around one of these days. I feel like they’re growing up before I get to know them.”

59

John G. is back at the Interfaith Volunteers Center. A piece of brown cardboard is stuck over a window Yankel the Jew hater punched through after he stopped taking his meds. Geraldo Rivera is on the rec room TV, running down an aisle with a microphone in his hand.

“Look at that Jew!” says Yankel, who’s back on Thorazine.

“He’s not ajew,” says John G. “He’s Puerto Rican.”

“I’m telling you he’s ajew!” says Yankel. “His real name’s Jerry Rivers.”

“That’s his real name? Bullshit.” John rocks from side to side. “Jerry Rivers was a fake name. He’s always been Puerto Rican. Why would ajew pretend to be Puerto Rican?”

Yankel smiles. “Because the P.R.’s are the ones who really run everything. The Jews are just a front.”

“Maybe he’s a Puerto Rican Jew,” says a third guy sitting between them, a chunky, high-voiced black man who calls himself Shitskin. “Maybe his mama’s a Puerto Rican and his daddy’s a Jew.”

“In my old nabe,” says John G., “the Puerto Ricans and the Jews hated each other almost as much as the blacks and the Jews.”

“So maybe he hates hisself,” says Shitskin.

They all just sit there for a minute, thinking about that.

Over in the corner, a Dominican catatonic named Miguel
dances in front of the fish tank, waving his hands like he’s trying to hypnotize the guppies.

“Say, man, you wanna go see Scottie?” says Shitskin.

“Nah, I just wanna chill,” says John.

John stares at his fingers. He’s still tempted. Since he saw Margo the other night, he’s thought about getting high two or three times an hour. But he knows that if he falls again, he might not get back up.

Easy does it. One day at a time. Keep out those bad ideas.

“How’s it going?” A gruff man’s voice interrupts his flow.

John G. turns and the first image that registers in his mind is a black fire hydrant. He takes a second to concentrate and organize his thoughts. The side of his brain that’s been having its way lately tells the rest of his mind that it’s not a fire hydrant. It’s a squat sloe-eyed black man wearing a gray golf cap. Possibly a new resident. Almost definitely another homeless guy, albeit without the dirty clothes and the funky street odor like a halo of flies around him.

“How you doing?” he says a little louder, making sure John is listening.

“I’m doing all right.”

Just let me watch my show and leave me alone, John thinks. Bad enough he missed his last appointment at the clinic and showed up late at his NA meeting last night. Now they’ve got annoying friendly people at the center.

Geraldo is screaming at two fat white women on the panel. “You’re both grandmothers! And you’re both sleeping with your granddaughter’s boyfriend! Do you expect people to feel sorry for you?!”

The grandmothers’ boyfriend, a bristle-headed twenty-three-year-old mechanic, looks on sheepishly.

“Ho, that’s fucked up!” says Shitskin.

John’s reached a different kind of ledge in his life. On the one hand, he’s not sure how to climb any higher; on the other, he’s afraid he’ll slip and fall into the abyss. The nights are what’s hardest. He finds himself waking up and calling out Shar’s name. The need to be with her and Margo, to touch them, to be lying in bed next to them is as bad as his craving for drugs.

But then he remembers Margo is dying, and that yearning will never be satisfied.

The past is the past.

“You en-joying it here?” the man in the golf cap asks, sitting down between John G. and Shitskin. His left nostril and earlobe have the same skin pigment as a white man’s.

“ ‘S all right,” John mutters, edging away from him down the couch.

A commercial comes on the television. Nobody Beats The Wiz. Two happy, adorable children getting Nintendo from their parents.

“Don’t give you much to do here, do they?” asks the man in the golf cap.

“I don’t mind.” John G. has almost reached the edge of the couch and the armrest.

“Hey, anybody ever say you look like Myron Cohen?” Yankel asks the man.

“I’m just saying there are other kinds of places,” the man in the golf cap says to John G. “Some of these volunteer centers, they give you a place to sleep and they send you to NA meetings and that’s it. So where does that leave you?”

“Hey, man, I’m trying!” says John, finally having enough of this fool and figuring the only way to shut him up is to talk back. “I’ve been clean for like a month.”

Not counting the other night.

“So what?” says the man. “Now you’re maybe on a par with the rest of the world.”

He gets up and walks over to the window, gesturing to the fleet of taxis, buses, and regular cars making their way up Broadway. “Most of these people are clean too,” he says. “You come out of this place and say you don’t do drugs anymore, you know what they’re going to tell you?”

He opens his arms as if he’s trying to pick up a boulder. “They’re gonna tell you, ‘Kiss my hairy butt sideways.’ There isn’t anybody who’s gonna give you an award for not doing drugs. ‘Cept somebody else in your program. And when they give you that little plastic me-dal-lion and a hug, how are you gonna trade that in for a steak?”

The Geraldo show has returned to the screen. A therapist in a bright red dress is introduced and she comes out, giving high fives to the young meatheads in hockey shirts in the audience. John G. watches her sit between the two grandmothers and their boyfriend, dispensing sensible advice. Soon the two women are on the floor hitting each other, the therapist is jumping out of her seat, and Geraldo is standing back from the scene, looking perfectly aghast.

“Please, please, ladies,” he says. “Violence is never the answer.”

“Ho, that’s fucked up,” says Shitskin.

“Okay, okay, okay. So what are you selling me instead of NA?” John looks at the man in the golf cap. “God or drugs?”

“Neither. I’m talking about the higher power. Of the J-O-B.” He takes a card out of his wallet and tosses it onto John’s lap.

The name on the card is Ted Shakur Jr. His company is called the Brooklyn Redevelopment and Reclamation Society.

“This about jobs or putting up buildings?” John asks.

“Both.” Ted Shakur starts to rise. “Think about it awhile. Then give us a call. I’ll tell you about it.”

“What’s the matter? Why can’t you talk now?”

“I’m not supposed to be hanging around here. The people who run this place might think I’m trying to steal away their clients and bite into their funding.” He gives a sly smile before he walks away. “There’s money to be made in poverty, you know.”

WINTER

60

A gray smeary day in the city. Snow coats the sidewalks and licks the curbs. Maintenance men in orange jackets spread salt on the pavement. Christmas shoppers hurry by, expelling quick balloons of cold air. Dark birds huddle on windowsills for warmth.

Jake sits in Susan Hoffman’s office, surrounded by cardboard boxes full of evidence just turned over by the district attorney’s office.

His life has been circumscribed by these boxes. He no longer sees his favorite buildings and landmarks, the pretzel man on the corner, or the Peruvian flute players in the subway. There’s a force field between him and life’s normal pleasures. He closes his eyes and he sees cardboard boxes.

Act, he tells himself. Complacency is death. This is the time to think and take charge.

“Okay, we have a month until the trial begins,” she says. “So in cases like this, I usually find there are two things the defense has to do.”

Jake looks up from reading the formal indictment.

“Number one.” Susan holds up a finger. “We have to discredit the prosecution’s witness. And number two, we need to present a believable story of our own.”

“Sounds easy when you say it like that.”

Susan’s brow comes down like a storm cloud. “Let’s go back to
number one. What do we know about their lead witness, Philip Cardi?”

Jake pulls out the grand jury transcript. “He has two prior convictions and he’s entered into a plea agreement with the state.”

“We need to find out more if I’m going to do a thorough cross-examination. So that’s one of your main assignments for the next two weeks.”

“Right, teach.”

Jake starts taking notes on a yellow legal pad. It relaxes him, to think about strategy. It reminds him of when he was just a lawyer and not a defendant.

He doesn’t go to the office anymore. After a tense meeting with Todd Bracken and the other partners, it was determined that he would work from home until the trial is over. So as not to interfere with the final stages of the Greer, Allan merger. “Thanks for being a team player, Jake.” Todd gave him a limp handshake. “We’ll remember it later.” Yeah, right. The only reason they don’t fire him outright is because he still has Bob Berger as a loyal client and an insurance policy. Good old Bob. Keeping him out of the gutter.

“Now what about their other witnesses?” Susan leans back in her chair, a blue pen sideways in her mouth like a tango dancer’s rose. “Who’s James Taylor?”

“The singer?”

She checks some papers on her desk. “I’m reading the grand jury testimony of James Taylor. Are you telling me this isn’t someone we know?”

“Never heard of him.”

She flips back a few pages and reads. “ ‘Question: Where were you living at the time of this incident? Answer: In them tunnels under the park. It’s easier for me to get along down there. Question: You mean, because of the disability with your arm? Answer: I mean, ‘cause I don’t pay any rent.’ “ Susan lowers the pages. “This ring any bells for you?”

Jake concentrates hard and pulls Philip’s flashlight beam up from the recess in his brain. He puts himself back in the tunnel
that night and sees the man with one arm hunched over a shopping cart, squinting into the light. He can even hear his voice: “Come the fuck out, man. These people want to see you.”

“I think that’s probably the guy who identified me in the lineup.”

“He’s a real problem for us,” Susan warns him.

“Why? This is a guy who takes drugs and lives next to a set of railroad tracks. If I was cross-examining him, my main concern would be not taking him apart too quickly so the jury doesn’t feel sorry for him.”

“That may be,” Susan sighs. “But he can still put you on the scene in the tunnel that night.”

“So what?” Jake scratches his wrist. “Their whole case is built on the testimony of Philip, who’d be my codefendant if he hadn’t cut a deal, his cousin Ronnie, and this guy Taylor, who’s a dwarf on crack.”

“Don’t forget that baseball bat with your prints on it. That may have been what gave them the confidence to go ahead and indict.”

“Yeah, yeah.”

It took Jake a while to figure out how the prints got there. “Here, hold this.” Philip handing him the bat with the taped handle while he tied his shoe. It’s those thoughtless little Kodak moments that can ruin your life.

“I still can’t even believe the DA brought this case to the grand jury. It’s just because that cretin’s got a hard-on for me.”

“Do me a favor. Do not refer to Norman McCarthy as a cretin in public. All right?”

“Well I don’t see how he puts these clowns in the witness box with a straight face,” Jake says. “Why don’t we make another motion to dismiss?”

Susan looks at him with wistful indulgence, as if he’s a child who finally needs to hear the truth about Santa Claus. “You’re missing the larger picture. Yes, it’s true you can pick apart individual witnesses, and it’s true you can argue the physical evidence, but what they can give the jury is an overall pattern.”

“What are you talking about?”

She massages the bridge of her nose. “What they can do is demonstrate that Jacob Schiff is a man obsessed with homeless people. It’s not just the newspapers getting it wrong. They have the sergeant from the precinct where you first filed a complaint about Alex being harassed. They have the minutes from the Mental Hygiene hearing at the hospital where you tried to have a homeless man committed.” Her voice rises to emphasize each point. “Then they have Philip Cardi saying you came to him, asking him to help you solve the problem. They even have checks you wrote him.”

“For fixing my door and my chimney!”

“And to top it all off,” says Susan, keeping her voice above his, “they have this Taylor saying he saw you in the tunnel and they have your fingerprints on the baseball bat used to commit the murder.”

Jake becomes very quiet. “I still think a jury might sympathize with me.”

“You are an officer of the court,” Susan tells him in the stentorian tones she used when she was a prosecutor. “If they believe you were involved in the commission of a major crime, they will show you no mercy.”

Jake gets up and goes to look out the window. A small dark car is trying to nudge its way through the snowy intersection of Thirty-fourth Street and Fifth Avenue. From this high up, it looks like a bug trying to make its way across a vast bowl of white rice.

Hanukkah has been and gone. Christmas is coming up in a little over a week. He should be out doing last-minute shopping for his family.

“I could testify myself,” he says, still looking out the window.

“Then you could get on the stand and talk about all the little child killers and drug dealers you got released as a lawyer and how you went crazy when some lawbreaker showed up on your own doorstep. That’d be good. And then you could try lying when they ask you on direct if you were there in the tunnels that night. So you could perjure yourself and lose your license even if we do manage to win this case.”