Bitter Truth (4 page)

“Oh, that’s Mr. Harrington. He is in the trust and estates department,” said James.

“With a face like that I bet he’s got a load of old lady clients.”

“No sir, just the one keeps him busy enough.”

“One?” I turned around in surprise. As I had expected, Harrington was still staring bullets at me.

“The Reddmans, sir. He manages the entire Reddman estate.”

“Of the Reddman Pickle Reddmans?”

“Exactly, sir,” said James as he urged me out the entranceway.

“The Reddmans,” I said. “Imagine that.”

“Thank you for banking at First Mercantile,” said James, just before I heard the click of the glass door’s lock behind me.

5

D
RIVING BACK into town on the Schuylkill Expressway I wasn’t fighting my way through the left lanes. I stayed, instead, in the safe slow right and let the buzz of the aggressive traffic slide by. When a white convertible elbowed into my lane, inches from my bumper, as it sped to pass a truck in the center, I didn’t so much as tap my horn. I was too busy thinking. One woman was dead, from suicide or murder, I wasn’t sure yet which, another was paying me ten thousand dollars to find out, and now, most surprisingly, they both seemed to be Reddmans.

We all know Reddman Foods, we’ve been consuming its pressure-flavored pickles since we were kids — sweet pickles, sour pickles, kosher dill pickles, fine pickled gherkins. The green and red pickle jar with the founder’s stern picture above the name is an icon and the Reddman Pickle has taken its place in the pantheon of American products, alongside Heinz Ketchup and Kellogg’s cereal and the Ford motor car and Campbell’s soup. The brand names become trademarks, so we forget that there are families behind the names, families whose wealth grows ever more obscene whenever we throw ketchup on the burger, shake out a bowl of cereal, buy ourselves a fragrant new automobile. Or snap a garlic pickle between our teeth. And like Henry Ford and Henry John Heinz and Andrew Carnegie, Claudius Reddman was one of the great men of America’s industrial past, earning his fortune in business and his reputation in philanthropy. The Reddman Library at the University of Pennsylvania. The Reddman Wing of the Philadelphia Art Museum. The Reddman Foundation with its prestigious and lucrative Claudius Reddman grants for the most accomplished artists and writers and scholars.

So, it was a Reddman who had pointed a gun at me and then begged me for help, an heir to the great pickle fortune. Why hadn’t she told me? Why had she wanted me to think her only a poverty-struck little liar? Well, maybe she was a little liar, but a liar with money was something else again. And I did like that smile.

“What would you do if you were suddenly stinkingly rich?” I asked Beth.

“I don’t know, it never crossed my mind.”

“Liar,” I said. “Of course it crossed your mind. It crosses every American mind. It is our joint national fantasy, the communal American wishing for a fortune that is the very engine of our economic growth.”

“Well, when the lottery was at sixty-six million I admit I bought a ticket.”

“Only one?”

“All right, ten.”

“And what would you have done with all that money?”

“I sort of fantasized about starting a foundation to help public interest law organizations.”

“That’s noble and pathetic, both.”

“And I thought a Porsche would be nice.”

“Better,” I said. “You’d look good in a Porsche.”

“I think so, yes. What about you, Victor? You’ve thought about this, I suppose.”

“Some.” A radical understatement. Whole afternoons had been plundered in my fervent imaginings of great wealth acquired and spent.

“So what would you do?”

“The first thing I’d do,” I said, “is quit.”

“You’d leave the firm?”

“I’d leave the law, I’d leave the city, I’d leave my life. I’d cocoon somewhere hot and thick with coconuts and return as something else completely. I always thought I’d like to paint.”

“I didn’t know you had any talent.”

“I have none whatsoever,” I said cheerfully. “But isn’t that the point? If I had talent I’d be a slave to it, concerned about producing my oh so important work. Thankfully, I am completely talentless. Maybe I’d go to Long Island and wear Gap khakis and throw paint on canvas like Jackson Pollock and drink like a fish every afternoon.”

“You don’t drink well.”

“You’re right, and I’ve never been to Long Island, but the image is nice. And did I mention the Ferrari? I’d like an F355 Spider in candy-apple red. I hear the babes, they love the Ferrari. Oh hell, who knows, I’d probably be miserable even so, but at least I wouldn’t be a lawyer.”

“Do you really hate it that much?”

“You see the law as a noble pursuit, as a way to right wrongs. I see it as a somewhat distasteful job that I’m shackled to by my monthly credit card bills. And if I don’t get out, and soon,” I said, without a hint of humor in my voice, “it’s going to kill me.”

The car in front of me flashed its rear red lights and the car beside me slowed and I braked to a stop and soon we were just sitting there, all of us, hundreds and hundreds of us, parked in the largest parking lot in the city. The Schuylkill did this every now and then, just stopped, for no apparent reason, as if the King of Commuting, in his headquarters in King of Prussia, simply flicked a switch and turned the highway off. We sat quietly for a few minutes before the horns began. Is there anything so futile in a traffic jam as a horn?
Oh, I’m sorry, I didn’t know you were in such a hurry, in that case maybe I’ll just ram the car in front of me
.

“I’d like to travel,” said Beth. “That’s what I would do if I suddenly had too much money.”

She had been thinking about it the whole time we had been stuck and that surprised me. For me to mull over all I would do with all the money I wanted was as natural as breathing, but it was not so natural for Beth. Generally she evinced great satisfaction with her life as it was. This was my first indication ever that her satisfaction was waning.

“I never saw the point of traveling,” I said. “There’s only so many museums you can rush through, so many old churches, until you’re sick of it all.”

“I’m not talking for just a week to see some museums,” said Beth. “I’m talking about taking a few years off and seeing the world.” I turned and looked at her. She was staring forward, as if from the prow of a swift ocean liner instead of through the windshield of a car stalled in traffic. “I always thought, as a girl, that there was something out there waiting for me and my purpose in life was to go out and find it. If there is a disappointment in my life it’s that I haven’t even really searched. I feel like I’ve been tromping around looking for it in Philadelphia only because the light is better here, when all along I know it’s someplace else.”

“Where?”

“I don’t know.”

“What?”

“I don’t know. It’s stupid, but it’s what I’d like to do. And even if it’s here in Philadelphia after all, maybe I need to spend time away, shucking off all my old habits and old ways of seeing and learn to look at everything new again, so I can find it. A couple of years in a foreign land is supposed to sharpen your vision.”

“At LensCrafters they’ll do it for you in less than an hour.”

“A safari in Africa. A jungle cruise up the Amazon. A month on a houseboat in India. Nepal. Sometimes I look at a map of Nepal and get chills. Katmandu.”

“What kind of toilets do they have in Katmandu? I won’t do any of that squatting stuff.”

“So if we were suddenly rich, Victor, I think what I’d do is go to Katmandu.”

The traffic started to crawl forward. First a foot at a time, then a few feet, then we began a twenty-mile-per-hour jog into the heart of the city. Beth was thinking about Katmandu, I suppose, while I thought about my Gap khakis and my Ferrari. And about Caroline Shaw.

Back in the office I sat at the quiet of my desk and ignored the message slips handed me by Ellie. I thought of things, thought of my neediness and my deprivations and how much I wanted out. I wanted out so desperately it hurt as bad as a lost love. I had to get out, for reasons that haunted half the lawyers in the country and for darker, more sinister reasons that Beth could never know. Everything was against my ever leaving, sure, except for how fiercely I wanted out. I sat and daydreamed about winning the lottery and dripping paint on canvases in the Hamptons with a gin and tonic in my hand and then I stopped daydreaming and thought about the Reddmans.

Guys like me, we don’t often brush shoulders with that much money and to accidentally rub up against it, like I did in that bank, does something ugly to us. It’s like seeing the most beautiful woman in the world walk by, a woman who makes you ache just to look at her, and knowing that she’ll never even glance in your direction, which slips the ache in even deeper. I thought about the Reddmans and all they were born to and I ached. More than anything in this world, I wish I had been born rich. It would have made up for everything. I’d still be ugly, sure, but I’d be rich and ugly. I’d still be weak and dim and tongue-tied with women, but I’d be rich enough for them not to care. I’d no longer be a social misfit, I’d be eccentric. And most of all, I’d no longer be what I was, I’d be something different. I thought about it all and let the pain of my impoverishment wash over me and then I started making calls.

“I don’t have time to chitchat,” said Detective McDeiss over the phone, after I had tracked him down to the Criminal Justice Building. “You need something from me, you can go through the D.A.”

“It’s not about an active prosecution,” I said. “The case I want to talk about is old and closed. Jacqueline Shaw.”

There was a pause and a deep breath. “The heiress.”

“I like that word, don’t you?”

“Yeah, well, this one hung herself. What could there possibly be left to talk about?”

“I don’t know. I just want to get some background. I’m representing the sister.”

“Good for you, Carl. It’s a step up I guess from your usual low-class grease-bucket clientele. How did you ever hook onto her?”

“She chased me down the street with a gun.”

“Tell me about it, you slimeball.”

“You free for lunch tomorrow?”

“To talk about Jacqueline Shaw?”

“Exactly. My treat.”

“Your treat, huh?” There was a pause while McDeiss reprioritized his day. “You eat Chinese, Carl?”

“I’m Jewish, aren’t I?” I said.

“All right then, one o’clock,” and he tossed out an address before hanging up. I knew that McDeiss wanted nothing to do with me, disdain dripped thick as oil from his voice, but in the last few years I had learned something about cops and one of the things I had learned was that there was not a cop on the force who would turn down a free lunch, even if it was just a $4.25 luncheon special at some Chinatown dive with fried rice and an egg roll soggy with grease.

Except the address he tossed out was not to some Chinatown dive, it was to Susanna Foo, the fanciest, priciest Chinese restaurant in the city.

6

P
ETER CRESSI had a dark, Elvisine look that just sort of melted women. He told me so in his own modest way, but he was right. Take the way our secretary, Ellie, reacted after he walked by whenever he walked by. She stared at him as he strutted past, her eyes popping, her mouth agape, and then, when the door was closed, she let out a sort of helpless giggle. He was a tomato for sure, Cressi, Big Boy or beefsteak, one of them, and from my dealings with him I knew him to be just about as smart. He was actually a little brighter than he looked, but then again he’d have to be.

“How’s it hanging wit’ you, Vic?” he said to me as he sat indolently in the chair across from my desk. “Low?” His dark eyes were partly brooding, partly blank, as if he were angry at something he couldn’t quite remember. His lemon tie, delicious and bright against his black shirt, was tied with entirely too much care.

“It’s not hanging so terrifically, Pete,” I said, shaking my head at him. “Next time you buy an arsenal, try not to purchase it from an undercover cop.”

Peter gave me a wink and looked off to the side, bobbing his head up and down as he chuckled at some private little joke. Cressi chuckled a lot, little he-he-he’s coming through his Elvis lips. “Who knew?”

“Good answer. That’s exactly what we’ll tell the jury.”

That chuckle again. “Just say I’m a collector.”

I opened the file and scanned the police report. “One hundred and seventy-nine Ruger Mini–14 semiautomatics with folding fiberglass stocks and two hundred kits for illegally modifying said firearms for fully automatic performance.”

“That’s what you should tell them I was collecting.”

“Also three grenade launchers and a flamethrower. A flamethrower, Peter. Jesus. What the hell did you need a flamethrower for?”

“A weenie roast?”

“That’s what your trial is going to be unless you sharpen up and get serious. You were also trying to buy twenty thousand rounds of ammunition.”

“Me and the guys, like we sometimes target shoot out in the woods.”

“What woods are we talking about here, Peter? They got any woods in South Philly I don’t know about? Like there’s a block just south of Washington they forgot to put a row of crappy houses on, it just slipped their minds?”

“Now you being funny, Vic.” His head bobbing, the he-he-he’s coming like an underpowered lawn mower. “Upstate, I’m talking. You know, bottles and cans. Maybe next time you want I should ask you along? It’s good to keep in training, if you know what I mean. And every now and then a stray bird it lands like a douche bag on the target and then, what do you think, bam, it’s just feathers floating.”

“Seriously, Pete. Why the guns?”

His eyes darkened. “I’m being serious as a fucking heart attack.”

He looked at me and I looked at him and I knew his look was fiercer than mine so I dropped my gaze back to the file. The guys I represented were nice guys generally, respectful, funny, guys to hang around and drink beer with, nice guys except that by and large they were killers. I must admit it didn’t take much to be fiercer than me, but still my clients scared me. Which made my current position even more tenuous and doubtful. But still I had a job to do.

“It says here,” I said, looking through the file, “that the undercover cop you were buying the weapons from, this Detective Scarpatti, made tapes of certain of your conversations.” I looked back up at Cressi, hoping to see something. “Anything we should be worried about?”

“What, you shitting me? Of course we should be worried. They probably got me on tape making the whole deal with that scum-sucking slob.”

“I assumed that. What I mean is any surprises, any talk about what you were going to do with the weapons? Any plots against a government building in Oklahoma or specific crimes planned which might cause us any problems? We’re not looking at additional conspiracy charges, are we?”

“No, no way. Just the deal.”

“How much money are we talking about?”

“In general or specific terms do you want?”

“Always be specific, Pete.”

“Ninety-five thou, eight hundred and ten. Scarpatti figured it out with a calculator, the fat bastard. I had more than that when they busted me, you know, for incidentals. He told me cash only.”

“No Visa card I guess.”

“I’m already over my limit.”

“Guys like you and me, Pete, it’s congenital.”

He chuckled and bobbed and said, “What’s that, dirty or something?”

I picked up another piece of paper from the file. It was just a copy of a subpoena, but I wanted to have something to look at so the question would seem offhand. “Where’d you get the cash?”

“You know, just lying around.” He-he-he.

I dropped the subpoena and looked up and put on my most annoyed look. I kind of squinted and twisted my lips and pretended I had just eaten a lemon. Then I waited a bit for his chuckling to die down, which, surprisingly, it did. “Maybe you are confused,” I said. “Maybe you are color blind. The guy in the blue suit, black shoes, red tie, that’s the prosecutor. He wants to put your butt in jail for a decade. My suit is blue and my shoes are black, sure, but look at my tie. It’s green.”

“Where’d you get that tie anyway, Woolworth’s?”

“Why not?”

“You know, Vic, your whole sense of style is in the toilet. Who shines your suits, anyway? And then you got them shoes. You should let me set you up with something new. I know a guy what got some flash suits might change your whole look. You might even get laid, do you some good. They’s a little warm is all, but you being a lawyer, what do you care, right?”

“Something wrong with my shoes?”

His sneer lengthened.

“What I’m trying to say is that I’m not the prosecutor here, I’m your lawyer. I’m here to help you. Everything we say in this room is confidential, you know that, it’s privileged, and no subpoena on earth can drag it out of me. But I can’t defend you properly unless I know the truth.”

“I’m not sure what you want I should tell you here, Vic. I thought you lawyers didn’t want to know the truth, that it limited what you could do, stopped you from bobbing here and weaving there, turned you from a Muhammad Ali, who was always dancing and sliding, to a Chuckie Wepner, from up there in Bayonne, getting hit like a speed bag, bam-bam-bam, and whose face was a bloody slice of sausage after round two. I thought the gig was that you would get the truth from me once you, like, knew what the best truth it was to tell.”

He was right, of course, which made everything a little more difficult. Cressi was an idiot, actually, except in the three things in which he had the most experience, screwing, shooting, and the criminal justice system. “It’s different,” I told him, “when there’s an undercover cop with tapes. When there’s an undercover cop with tapes I need to know everything or we’re liable to get blasted at trial. So I’m asking you again, and I want you to tell me. Where did you get the money?”

Cressi looked at me for a while, head tilted like a dog that was trying to figure out exactly what he was looking at. Then he shrugged. “I boosted six Mercedes off a lot. Just came in with a carrier I borrowed from a buddy what knew nothing about it, waived around some paperwork, and just took them. Drove them right to Delaware. Some Arab sheik and his sons right now they’re probably riding around in circles in the desert, smiling like retards.”

“You touch base with Raffaello on that deal?”

“You working for him or you working for me?”

“I’m working for you,” I said quickly, “but if you’re crossing him I have to know. I’m not going to create a defense for you that gets you out of trouble with the law but gets you dead when you hit the street. I’m trying to watch your back and your front, but you’ve got to level with me.”

Cressi turned his head and started bobbing, but there was no chuckle now. “We gave Raffaello his fifteen percent, sure, soon as the deal was done. It went through Dante, his new number two.”

“I thought Calvi was number two?”

“No, no more. There was a shake-up. Calvi’s in Florida. For good. Things change. Now it’s Dante.”

“Dante? I didn’t even know he was made.”

“Sure he was, under Little Nicky,” said Cressi, referring to the boss before the boss before Enrico Raffaello.

“Dante,” I repeated, shaking my head. Dante was the loan shark who bailed out Cressi yesterday morning. I had thought him strictly small time, just another street hood paying into the mob because he couldn’t count on the police to protect his illegal sharking operation, nothing more. He had moved up fast, Dante. Well, moving and lasting were two different things. I had liked Calvi, an irascible old buzzard with a sense of humor, a vicious smile, and a taste for thick, foul cigars that smelled of burning tires and rancid rum. I had liked Calvi, but he apparently hadn’t lasted and I didn’t expect Dante to last either.

“What about the guns?” I asked. “Did you touch base there too?”

“Nah, it was just kind of a hustle for a while. I didn’t think the guy could deliver, so I was going to play it out and see. I had a buyer, but I wasn’t sure of the seller.”

“Who was the buyer?”

“This group of wackos up in Allentown. Aryan bullshit, shaved heads and ratty trailers and target practice getting ready for the holy race war.”

“Who set it up?”

“I did.”

“Who else?”

“It was my gig, like, completely. Met this broad who took me to one of the meetings. Tits like cantaloupes, you know ripe ones like you get on Ninth Street. She talked about a retreat and I thought it was going to be hot. I thought an orgy or something. Turned out to be this militia-Nazi-bullshit-crap. I drilled her anyway. Then this tall, weird-looking geek started talking about guns and we set it up.”

“Just you? You were solo on this?”

“That’s what I said.”

He looked away and bobbed and his Adam’s apple bobbed too.

“All right,” I said. “That’s all for now. We have your preliminary hearing next week. We’re scheduled for ten, you get here nine-thirty and we’ll walk over together.”

“You don’t want to prepare me or nothing?”

“You’re going to sit next to me and not say a word and when I am done you’re going to leave with me. You think we need more preparation?”

“I think I can handle that.”

“I think maybe you can too. Tell me one thing more, Pete. You know Jimmy Vigs Dubinsky?”

“The bookie, sure. I done some favors for him.”

“You ever known him to whack someone who stiffs him?”

“Who, Jimmy? Nah, he’s a sweetheart. He cuts them off is all. Besides, you know, you can’t clip nobody without the boss’s approval. That’s like bottom line.”

“And he doesn’t approve much.”

“Are you kidding, you got to go to New York nowadays to get any kind of good experience. Up there it still rocks.”

“Thanks, that’s what I figured,” I said as I walked him out of my office into the hallway. Beth just happened to be at Ellie’s desk, talking about something oh-so-important as Peter walked by. They were both polite enough to hold their giggles until he was out of earshot.

“You too, huh, Beth?” I said, looking through a stack of mail on Ellie’s desk. “Well forget it, ladies. He likes women with cantaloupe breasts and empty minds.”

“Don’t you all?” said Beth.

“Come to think of it,” I said. “I’m going to step out for a cup of coffee. I’ll be right back. Anyone want anything?”

“Diet Coke,” said Beth. I nodded.

Down the hallway, past the accountant’s office and the architect’s office and the design firm that shared our office space, out the door, down the stairs, out to Twenty-first Street. I walked a few blocks to the Wawa convenience store and bought a cup of coffee in blue cardboard and a Diet Coke, which I stuck in my pocket. Out on the street, with my coffee in my hand, I looked both ways. Nothing. I walked a few more blocks and turned around. Nothing. Then I found a phone booth and put the coffee on the aluminum shelf. I dropped in a quarter and dialed and waited for the ringing to end.

“Tosca’s,” said a voice.

“Let me talk to table nine,” I said.

“One’a moment. I see if it available.”

About a minute later I heard a familiar voice, older and softer, peppered with an Old World accent. “Table nine,” it said.

“He says he got the money by stealing six cars off a Mercedes-Benz lot. He said he got you your share through Dante.”

“Go on.”

“He says he was going to resell the guns to some white supremacist group out in Allentown for a big profit.”

“You believe him?”

“He says he was on his own. I don’t think he whacks off on his own.”

“I don’t think so neither. He ever had a bright idea it’d be beginner’s luck. You find out who he was with.”

“And then we’re even and I’m through, right?”

“It’s so hard to quantify human relationships, don’t you think?”

“I hate this.”

“Life is hard.”

There was a firm click. I stood in the phone booth and tried to take a sip of the coffee but my hand was shaking so much it spilled on my pants. I cursed loudly and shook my pants leg and wondered at how I had made such a mess of everything.