The Intruder (42 page)

But Francis has come up with a unique way of finishing the job without pissing off the judge. Instead of using dynamite, he’s decided to smother the witness in velvet.

“So,” he says gently, “looking back, from your current medicated vantage point, how realistic is it that you could have saved your daughter?”

“I don’t know.” Gates sniffs.

“Well, it was an accident. Right?”

“I don’t know. I keep thinking maybe if I did one thing differently that day, she wouldn’t have died. Like if I hadn’t stayed at work to make a phone call. Or if I’d run my train closer to schedule. Or if I hadn’t shaved that morning. I would’ve been standing there on the corner a little earlier and then I would’ve been the one to cross the street first. And she wouldn’t have had to come running to me like that. And I would’ve taken her by the hand and we would’ve gone on with our lives the way they were.”

“So you still feel it’s your fault your daughter is dead. Right?”

“Sometimes I think about getting in front of a train or a car myself,” Gates says, wiping his face with a Kleenex and fighting hard to get control of himself.

“But you know that’s not going to make a difference. Right?”

“It’s how I feel.”

“But you know there’s a report from the police and Child Welfare saying no one was at fault. Don’t you?”

“Doesn’t matter,” Gates says, drawing himself up rigidly. “It’s still the way I feel.”

“So sometimes the way you feel is more important than the reality of a situation. Is that correct?”

“Sometimes,” Gates says before Susan can object.

“Then why should this court believe you when you say you know what happened the night of September fifth in the tunnel under Riverside Park? You don’t seem to have a very firm grip on reality, do you?”

The fingers stop wriggling on the railing. The jaw sets. Gates takes a deep breath, as if he’s reaching down deep inside himself for something he’s never been able to find. Then he looks Francis right in the eye.

“I know what happened,” he says in the steadiest voice Jake has ever heard him use. “I saw that man”—pointing to Jake—“step between my friend and the guy with the bat. I heard him say, ‘All right, guys, let’s leave.’ And then I saw them knock him down and hit him when he tried to take the bat.”

There’s dead quiet, except for footsteps outside and the echo of a door closing down the marble hallway.

After all these years trying cases, Jake is amazed the cliché still holds: the sound of truth is unmistakable in a courtroom. It’s like hearing a gunshot for the first time. You may not be able to describe it exactly, but you know it when you hear it.

Francis whirls on the judge. “I move that his answer be stricken as unresponsive.”

“You opened the door and invited him in, Mr. O’Connell.” Frankenthaler shrugs. “It’s too late to pull back the hors d’oeuvres tray.”

“Isn’t this burst of recovered memory rather convenient?” Francis asks Gates, his voice dripping with acid sarcasm.

“You can try tearing me down or pulling me apart.” Gates raises his chin, as if he’s daring Francis to take a swing at it. “You can’t take any more from me than what’s already taken. I’m still a man. I know what I saw.”

For a split second, he looks past Francis and past Jake at the defense table to Dana in the front row. Something seems to pass
between them, but it’s gone by the time Jake turns around to look at her.

“Any further questions?” the judge asks Francis before looking down to sign some papers.

“No. That will be all.” He nods to the stand. “Thank you, Mr. Gates.”

82

Two days later, Philip Cardi goes to see his attorney, Jim Dunning.

He finds his lawyer pacing back and forth in a cramped, windowless lower Broadway office, a filterless Camel burned down to the nub in his right hand. A poster on the wall shows a huge finger pointing and says
SOMEONE TALKED
!

“You know how there are times when people say, ‘Relax, don’t worry, things will work out okay’?” says Dunning, dragging hard on his butt. “Well, this is not one of those times. Okay? This is a time for concern. This may even be a time to be anxious. In fact, if you considered getting an ulcer before, this may be the time to develop one.”

“Why?” says Philip, trying to settle into an uncomfortably narrow seat with a maroon vinyl cushion. “What’s going on?”

“Is this me talking? Or is this them talking?”

“Whoever. What are they saying?”

“You know. They’re pissed. They’re asking for a dismissal on recommendation for the case against Schiff. Apparently their bum blew our bum out of the water at the Wade hearing. Our guy Taylor couldn’t even make a positive ID of Schiff. He showed up in court high on angel dust.”

“So why is that my problem?” asks Philip, noticing his left armrest is loose.

“Philip, they’re talking about throwing out the case and starting over with you as the defendant.” Dunning stubs out his cigarette. “They don’t just want to throw the book at you, they wanna throw the whole friggin’ library.”

“How can this happen? I was their lead witness.” Philip sags to his right and the other armrest breaks.

“Well, you’re not anymore. They’re probably going to charge you the day after tomorrow.”

Philip finds himself gasping for air. The walls and ceilings of the room seem to move a little closer,
SOMEONE TALKED!
A hundred years before, sweltering immigrant hordes had suffocated and rotted from disease in tight airless rooms in this neighborhood; today he’s the one dying.

“So what kind of case do they have?” Philip asks.

The lawyer sits down at his desk and looks at the file, the fingers of his right hand splayed across his ruddy forehead. The posture of the professional man about to deliver bad news.

“They’ve already got this homeless guy Gates saying you did it. And I understand from Francis that your cousin Ronnie isn’t exactly steady on our side.”

“Figures,” Philip grumbles. Ronnie has a line of drool where his spine should be. He’ll go whatever way the wind is blowing.

“But what’s really going to kill us is they’re probably going to get Schiff to testify against you.” Dunning takes off his wire-rimmed glasses and rubs his eye sockets. “And I have to say, he’s going to make a very powerful witness.”

“But—”

“They’re pissed off, Philip,” his lawyer interrupts. “They think you screwed them. The girl in particular, Fusco. She’s very upset. With the way you misled them. This is them talking. It’s not me.”

Philip starts cracking his knuckles. “What’s gonna happen?”

“Looking at it objectively, your situation is not good.” The lawyer frowns and puts his glasses back on. “The DA’s not interested in taking a plea from you since you’ve apparently lied to them already. Schiff’s people have the name of a girl who they say you almost killed in a warehouse about twenty years ago. That’s a crime you didn’t tell them about, which effectively scotches your plea agreement.”

“They say anything about my uncle?”

“No. So you might still have a little leverage there if you agree to testify against him immediately. But you’re still looking at serious time for this murder in the tunnel. Just a bit less time if you roll over on Carmine. Francis’s best offer is still eight and a third to twenty-five.”

Philip becomes very still.

“I can’t do prison time,” he says.

“I understand how you feel. Maybe we can knock this down to manslaughter. It sounds like there was provocation.”

“You don’t understand. I cannot do prison time.” Philip’s eyes remain steady. “I will slit my own throat before I spend another day locked up.”

“Why? What’s the big deal? You already have a record. You’ve been away before. You must know people inside.”

Philip doesn’t say anything for a minute. He has the look of a truck driver who’s seen too many white lines go under his wheels.

“I did a stretch when I was younger,” he says quietly. “And some things happened to me in there.”

“Yeah, like what?”

“Things I don’t like to talk about.”

Philip crosses his legs and folds his arms in front of his chest. He can’t go back. Going back means he’d have to become what he can’t accept.

“So what are my options?” he asks his lawyer.

“Options? What options?” Dunning looks down at his desk as if all the papers had suddenly changed places on him. “I just told you. They have three strong witnesses against you, physical evidence, and an office full of prosecutors who think you made them look like assholes. Pack your bags, my friend. You’re going.”

SOMEONE TALKED
! The finger on the poster is pointing right at Philip.

“There’s gotta be another way.” He pulls on his ear.

“Philip, I have to be honest with you. You’ve lied to them and now they’re going to get you for it. As long as they can pin this tunnel murder on you, they’re going to put you away for as long as they can. You have to start preparing yourself.”

A curdling rage turns inward and a burning compressed gas
forces its way up through Philip’s stomach into his chest. It’s not indigestion from the heavy lunch uptown. It’s sickness. Sickness of the soul. Sickness of life. He sees himself on an opera stage, a tragic figure in whiteface, being dragged down to the bowels of hell by faceless demons. He’s always secretly thought of himself as too large a presence for the mundane world he moved around in—the tar roofs, the long drives on the Long Island Expressway, the humiliating dinners with Uncle Carmine on Todt Hill—but even that world is about to end. A black despair begins to poison his very being.

No. He won’t allow it. He won’t allow things to be done to him again. He looks at the wall over his lawyer’s head. Law degrees, courtroom sketches, and just over to the left, a group of citations from the USMC. United States Marine Corps. All this time, he’d been thinking his lawyer was just some drunken hack. But there they are: the Purple Heart and the oak-leaf cluster, the Bronze Star. Symbols of courage and valor. The values men lived and died for.

Nothing in life is achieved without risk, Philip reminds himself. He’s done courageous things before to get out of trouble. Now he looks inside himself, trying to find that nerve again.

“What if those witnesses didn’t testify?” he asks. “What if Schiff decided he wasn’t going to cooperate? Think we’d stand a chance?”

“I don’t see how that’s in Schiff’s interest. Then he’d still be the one on the spot.”

“Well, he might change his mind.” Philip turns up his palms. “People are funny that way.”

83

AT
three-thirty that afternoon, Philip Cardi shows up at the Schiffs’ house in his red Dodge van. He parks on the south side of West Seventy-sixth Street and gets out carrying a blue toolbox. It’s a bitterly cold afternoon three days before New Year’s. The air hurts. Philip goes up the steps to the town house and tries the key that Jake gave him on the front gate. But the locks have been changed. He curses and looks up at the pink-and-gray smoke sky.

A garbage truck rumbles by and a blonde woman in thigh-high suede boots teeters past walking a dachshund. Philip opens his toolbox and takes out a small pick set in a black vinyl case. He unzips it and finds the right file for a Medeco lock. While he’s inserting it, one of the neighbors, an old man with an egg-shaped head and thick glasses, comes out to watch him. Though it’s the middle of the afternoon, the man wears a flannel bathrobe.

“How’s it going?” Philip says.

“I wasn’t sure who you were at first.” The old man points to the window he was watching from. “But I think I’ve seen you before.”

“Yeah, I was doing some work on their chimney.” Philip smiles. “You’re right to be careful, though. There’s a bad element in this neighborhood.”

The old man goes back in his house just as Philip breaks the lock.

Jake, Dana, and Alex come home at quarter to five with the groceries.

“Now the thing I want to do first is attack the living room,” says Dana, hanging up her shearling coat and reaching for the light switch. “We’ve been letting this house go all to hell because we thought we had this trial coming up. But we don’t have that excuse anymore.”

She flips on the light. Philip Cardi is sitting on the new George Smith couch with a copy of
Atlantic Monthly
on his lap and his feet up on the glass coffee table.

“Let’s take a ride,” he says.

Twenty minutes later, Jake is behind the wheel of Philip’s Dodge van, driving the four of them across the Brooklyn Bridge.

A portion of his mind is still refusing to accept the reality of what’s happened. Their lives are supposed to be going back to normal. They should be turning around and heading home. They’ve got no business riding in vans with men holding .357 Magnums. They’re supposed to be having dinner at Café fucking Luxembourg tomorrow night.

Philip hums “The 59th Street Bridge Song.” “Do, do, do, do, feelin’ groovy...”

Jake glances off to the right, looking for the Statue of Liberty around the bend in the frozen river. Brooklyn approaches. The giant cargo loaders towering like dinosaurs over the piers. The Jehovah’s Witnesses’ Watchtower building. The old disused warehouses so ugly they’re beautiful. A fading dusk light touches all of them, infusing this part of the city with a kind of bittersweet glory.

Jake tells himself he won’t let this life slip away so easily. He’s worked too hard, looked forward to too much.

A silver Integra starts to pass him on the left and he turns the wheel just slightly toward it. Maybe an accident is the way to get out of this.

“Counselor, look at me,” Philip says from the backseat.

“What?”

Jake’s eyes move up to the rearview mirror. He sees Philip grab Alex by the hair and jam a gun into his right ear.

“If you do that again,” Philip says calmly. “Everybody in this car dies.”

Jake straightens the wheel and listens to the hum of treads under the van. All of a sudden, he understands how John G. lost his mind.