We Were Beautiful Once (25 page)

Jack leaned forward in the seat and asked anxiously. “What's this about?”

“Let's wait till we get there,” Travers said guardedly. Jack saw Jones looking at him through the rearview.

“You cops?”

“Sort of. We work for the government, US Government.”

Jones was wearing a summer suit with a white shirt and open collar. He was a big tall guy with light colored hair—hard for Jack to judge his height, but had to be over two hundred pounds. Travers, a smaller, swarthy man, sat sphinx-like.

The car turned down Barnum, drove about a mile into the rear of a dirty brick building with a sign:
Prince Harry Bar and Grille
. The parking lot was dark with two cars parked against the building. Being familiar with the place, Jack breathed a little easier. As Jack opened the door Travers rested his arm on the back of the seat, “Wait, before we get out, let me tell you why we wanted to talk.”

Jack slid behind the driver's seat. Travers had small, steely eyes reminiscent of a Doberman. “We've been following the Girardin case and have reason to believe that this Art Girardin guy is a flake...  and— ”

Jack interrupted. “Wait, let's start over. Who're you guys?”

“We work for the government, like I said,” Travers replied in a tone that riled Jack.

“But the government's big.”  

“Steve and me, we're part of DIS.”

“And what's that?”

“Defense Intelligence Service,” Travers responded, sounding like a cop.

“Army, Navy, what?”

“Defense.”

“Ok, so what's that gotta do with me?”

“You can't help the situation, especially, if some shyster lawyer gets you on the stand, twists your memory—you know, making you look like a whatcha-call-it turncoat.”

Jack's face began to flush. “Look, Mack, I don't like the way this is startin' off.”

“Aw'right, leave that aside.”

“Get to the fucking point.”

“Bottom line? We're gonna buy you a ticket for a vaca', down south a few weeks,” said Travers.

“Leave tonight,” Jones snickered.

Jack grinned cautiously. “Are you guys shittin' me?”

“Nope, dead serious.” Travers pulled his thin lips back, like a dead man grinning.

Jack did not like the way Travers said it.

“Well, I'd have to think it over.”

Traver's tightened his jaw. “Ok, you got about two minutes, and Mr. O'Conner, I might add...  little choice.”

“Look, Travers, I ain't got no beef with you guys. I don't even know who the Christ you are. I'm not even sure I'd help Girardin's side, but I don't like being told I gotta do anything.”

“Jack, we're trying to do this quick and professional. I'm told you're a smart guy, so I decided not to beat around the bush,” he said, his face relaxing.

“Who told you?” Jack asked, showing concern.

“That's something we can't discuss, but we'd pay for the entire trip. Wanna take a girlfriend, we can arrange that, too. But be fast.  Tomorrow, latest. Come on, all expenses.”

“I appreciate that, but I ain't making no decision tonight.”

With that, Jack left the car and walked toward the bar. Just before he reached the rear door he felt a large hand grab his shoulder. He swung around: it was Jones, all 6'4”, forty waist.

“Wait a minute buster, get back in the car, so we can work this out.”

“Fuck you.” Jack shook off his hand and reached for the bar door.  Jones' beefy forearm corralled his neck. Jack yelled, “What the fuck you doing, you fat bastard?” He struggled, but the giant had him in a bear grip. Travers came around the front.

“Look O'Conner make it easy on yourself.”

“What the fu—?” Jack screamed.

Before he finished his expletive an air-deflating blow slammed into his solar plexus. As he gasped for air, a fist came across his jaw. He remembered nothing else, until he woke up in the middle of the night, smelling like gin, uniformed cops on each side. When he saw the uniforms, he bolted, but they tackled him. He swung at them and they cold cocked him.

 

 

WHEN JACK HADN'T APPEARED IN COURT ON MONDAY according to the subpoena the sheriff served the morning he walked back from the diner, Nick was not overly concerned, because Jack actually knowing Roger Girardin had seemed like a long shot. But Jaeger's testimony changed all that. The O'Conner he had testified as helping him out of a jam, may well have been Jack Prado O'Conner. On Thursday, Nick had Mitch tell the oversized sheriff to leave a second subpoena ordering him to court on Friday. When Jack failed to show Friday, the first item on Nick's weekend “to do” list was to find O'Conner. He had to determine if he needed Jack to testify about Jaeger's unlikely claim that Girardin had died on the ridge. He called Jack's phone Saturday and Sunday. He sat back wondering what to do next, flipped open a phone book, found Prado, and called a half-dozen names, none related to Jack.  But on the seventh call heard, “Yes, Jack Prado.  He's my husband.”

Bingo!
“Is he there?” Nick asked.

“No, he's not.”

“Will he be home later?”

“No, I don't think so, he doesn't live here anymore.”

“Can you tell me where I might find him?”

At first, Anna wasn't interested in talking about her husband, especially to a lawyer, but reluctantly she volunteered that Jack had been depressed, drinking hard, passing out.

“I learned he was arrested Friday night. Police told me he was drunk at the rail yard, on the tracks. You know, at the far end of Willa Street. Claimed they yelled out. He ran, slugged a cop.”

“Is he in lock-up at the police station?”

“I don't know. All I know's he's in jail.”

Nick ran Jack down at the county jail, but decided to wait until Monday morning to catch him at the arraignment.

***

On local maps a small rectangle points to the red, granite courthouse on the corner of East Main and Hill Street. It was built in 1848, a time when “Victorian” stood for more than an architectural style—especially to convicts sentenced to hard labor or the gallows. Nick went into the prosecutor's office and asked to see Jack's arrest report. He learned that later in the morning he would be charged with resisting arrest, assaulting an officer and criminal trespass. The judge would be familiar with the place, the rail yard where the inebriated homeless had sought refuge in abandoned boxcars for decades. Depending on his view of cops, the railroad, the homeless and the man standing in front of him, he would decide whether to set the bond so high Jack would be held over for trial or to let him walk. In either case, to be disposed of down the line, an immaterial artifact on one scale-pan of a balance beam held by none other than that blind woman called Justice. After reading the file, Nick proceeded to lock-up to find Jack.

Off the central rotunda, marbled busts of past jurists led the public to three courtrooms, a dozen offices, two Lysol-laden lavatories and a maze of oak planked dark hallways. Nick, in pinstriped suit and with briefcase in hand, walked down one hallway to a steel door, behind which was a stairwell to the catacombs below the courtrooms. To get into the stairwell, Nick had to know the jailer—who only admitted lawyers, cops and clerks. In the forty years on the job, the guard never had to decide whether judges were permitted below.

“Who you here for?”

“A Jack Prado? No, make that O'Conner, Jack O'Conner.”

The guard put his un-calloused hand behind his extended derrière to retrieve a chain with a key. Nick passed through the opening and hesitated for a few seconds, before the tunnel-like flight of smoothly worn granite stairs that disappeared into darkness.

On the first landing, Nick encountered a rancid bouquet of alcohol, sweat, urine, feces and vomit. At the bottom of the stairwell, the air thickened, water dripping along one side into a fetid puddle. Nick could no longer hold his breath.  A few six-by-six cells held two prisoners each, one fourteen-by-fourteen cell held eighteen. Another held a solitary man accused of murder, another a woman, and yet another a man sick beyond drunken heaves. No vacancies.  A somber, living tomb, where except for the erratic groans and moans of self pity and despair, the tenants hear no evil and see no evil, and on this day were oblivious to Nick's presence.

As Nick got closer to his destination he detected an undercurrent of broken mumbling.

“Cracker Jacker, what're ya gonna do, those blind will one day see you, please, leave me the sea...  Jack, Jack, Jack be nimble, Jack be quick, All work and no play. Easy Mac, cracker Jack...  he's a prick.”

Nick saw a man sitting on the edge of the bunk, his elbows on his knee, head on his hands, swaying slightly back and forth.

“Jack.  Jack O'Conner?”

The mumbling stopped. Jack's head snapped up, his face drawn and unshaven.  A shiner, a swollen right cheek, a split lip and bloodshot eyes—maybe from crying, or maybe from years of drugs and alcohol. Nick could not be sure.  He had met many men in this place, most with faces summing up a past of brutal self destruction; a self-defeatist life of several interminable lifetimes.

“Mr. O'Conner, my name's Nick Castalano.  I'm an attorney.”

“Not O'Conner—Prado. You my lawyer?”

“No, I represent a man who's trying to find out what happened to his brother during the Korean War. You were in Korea. Right?”

Jack put his head down taking a couple of short quick breaths. “I don't need this shit right now, mister.” He cupped his face, rubbed his eyes. “That was a thousand years ago.”

“Well, Mr. Prado, only a few questions.”

“Not now.  I don't want to answer any fucking questions. Beat it!”

“Mr. Prado, promise I won't take much of your time.”

“Look, I ain't got nothin'.”

“I need to have you look at something—tell me what you think, that's all. We can do it here or I can have you brought before a federal judge. Have it your way.”

For a few seconds it was quiet except for the sounds of a woman sobbing. Jack closed his eyes. “Get me out of here, and I'll talk as long as you want.”

“I can't, Mr. Prado.  I may have to call you as a witness, and I can't very well be your lawyer, too.” Nick omitted that there was always the possibility that Jack would be an adversarial witness, one that he might have to rake over the coals.

“All right, then if you want, let's talk after I get out of here, but listen up, I ain't going be no witness.”

“Tell you what, Mr. Prado, I'll wait for you upstairs. When the arraignment's over, we can talk?”

Jack looked at Nick. “You think I'll get out today?”

“Can't say.  They'll probably ask for bond. Have you been in trouble before?”

“Never. First time.”

Nick returned to the upper world and walked through the double door entrance to the arraignment court, the drainpipe for the criminal justice system. He would wait to see if Nick walked out a free man. Now that he had finally found him, he did not want Jack slipping through his fingers. An hour passed before Jack, represented by a public defender, appeared and in just a few minutes more, the judge pronounced the only words that mattered, “You are free to go, sir, on your own recognizance. Don't leave the state. Next case!”

Nick met Jack on the way out, and the two went to a small conference room where Nick occasionally met clients. Plaster walls lathered and troweled in the last century were gray and graffitied, but otherwise retained their smooth hardness. The place whiffed faintly of feces from the infrequent bum who used the room to nap, defecate and leave. In the center was an oak table carved with hundreds of initials and two folding chairs for defendants to discuss past faults and divine their future with an advocate licensed to contribute to their fate.

With a stubble beard, Jack reeked from a combination of halitosis, alcohol, urine and body odor. Nick walked over to a frosted window, forced it open and let in the siren sound of an ambulance stuck behind a fender bender, opting to talk over the racket rather than take the stench. Jack stood waiting, his arms wrapped around himself.

“Have a seat,” he said in a loud voice.

The men sat across from one another. “I noticed the prosecutor referred to you as O'Conner, yet you go by Prado, which is it?”

Jack exhaled, moving restlessly in his chair. “My mother's maiden name is Prado, I prefer that, but my legal name is O'Conner. You can refer to me as Prado...  Man, do you have a cig?”

“No, gave it up.”

“Is this gonna take long? I am dying for somethin' to eat.”  Jack rotated his head like he was trying to release a crick in his neck.

“No, this won't take long. Tell me, did you know a Roger Girardin when you were in the service?”

Nick could not be sure if he had seen a shudder run through Jack—the man shifted constantly.

“Not sure, maybe...  maybe, vaguely,” Jack said in a way that did not give Nick confidence he was ready to cooperate.

“He was from Bridgeport.”

“Like I told ya, maybe.”

“Well, if you knew him, would it have been while you were a POW?”

“Don't remember him there.” Jack folded his swollen lower lip under his upper teeth.

“When then?  When'd you know him?”

“Might have been a guy that was with me in the 24th.”

“He never returned from Korea... ”

“Mister, could have been MIA, KIA.  Lots of things happened.”

“Like, maybe he didn't come back with the other soldiers?”

Nick saw Jack's jaw stiffen. “What're you driving at?”

Nick raised his hands, palms open. “Hey, it's no business of mine. But, those couple of dozen guys that decided to stay on with the Chinese after the POW exchange were called turncoats. Right? It's possible Girardin defected, isn't it?”