Fresh Kills (31 page)

“Counselor, we've got your client,” the court offer said. I jumped up; time to go to work. I stepped lightly past the desk where the court clerk was explaining to Murray Singer that he'd have to come back after 2:15.

I gave my client the bad news; I'd been on the phone to the D.A. the day before, and the offer was ten to twenty. No room for negotiation. This was his third armed robbery and he was going to do serious time.

“I can't be doin' no ten to twenty,” Rafael Guzman moaned from his side of the bars. “The whole crime ain't took but three minutes.”

“Unfortunately, the fact that you've perfected the art of armed robbery to where you can pull a gun and get away with the cash register receipts in a mere three minutes is not—”

“Oh, Jesus,” my client continued, drawing out the syllables in what was almost a genuine prayer. He dropped his head into his hands and moaned again.

He sat on a bench in a metal holding pen. The walls were stone, but painted gunmetal gray; there were bars between us and a cold green metal table on which I rested my elbows and waited. My client was going to have to understand that he'd be spending at least the next ten years in rooms no more comfortable than this one. That gray would be the color and hard clanking the sound.

“I went out to see the complaining witness,” I went on. “I took an investigator with me; we talked to her for a good twenty minutes. She saw you, Rafael. She remembered the tattoos on your arms, the—”

“Lots of guys got these tattoos,” he protested. He rolled up a gray-green sleeve to show me. “They get them in jail all the time.” He pointed to the crudely drawn snake on the inside of his forearm and to the teardrop at the corner of his eye.

“Great,” I said, shaking my head. “I can see myself now, standing in front of a jury. ‘Ladies and gentlemen, Rafael Guzman didn't commit this crime; some other jamoke with a jailhouse tattoo did it.' Think about it, Rafael; the only way to defend you is to admit you've got a record the size of the Staten Island phone book.”

“Man, I don' know,” he said, shaking his nearly shaved head. “All's I know is I can't be doin' them double digits.”

I looked at Rafael. Junkie-skinny, the shaved head showing nicks and scars where he'd sustained injuries. Wearing torn jeans that weren't distressed in a factory for yuppie kids, and cheap sneakers worn down at the sides by his pigeon-toed feet. He was a mess. A mess who committed felonies for a living.

What the hell was I going to use for a bargaining chip to get him a plea he could live with?

I'd hoped my visit to the complaining witness would turn up something. Something like the fact that she was ninety-six and wore glasses with lenses the thickness of—

She was in her fifties, with eyes sharp enough to see the tiny teardrop on Rafael's cheek. If we went to trial, the ten to twenty he was being offered would seem like a dream; he was a persistent violent felony offender, in the words of the Penal Code, and he'd go away for life.

A sentence he richly deserved. A sentence I was being paid to reduce as much as humanly possible. But how? I thought about it as I made my way back into the courtroom.

I looked up as the judge entered and took the bench. I was already standing at counsel table, so I nodded instead of rising. Judge Rossi nodded back. He was a plump, genial man who liked long lunch hours and fast pleas. It was twenty minutes to one; if I could get him out of here in time to make it to Armando's before the rest of the courthouse crowd, he'd be a friend for life. Or at least for the next ten minutes, which was all I needed.

“Well, Counselor,” he said, fixing me with impatient eyes. “Have we got a plea?”

I rolled the dice. I walked up to the bench and heaved a theatrical sigh. “We're very close, Your Honor,” I said, lying through my teeth. “Very close. There's just one little problem.”

Pause for effect. Tease him. Make him ask.

“And what's that, Ms. Jameson?”

I sighed again and gave him a wide-eyed stare. “My client says he can't be doin' them double digits.”

It could have gone either way. He could have slammed his fist down on the bench and roared at the court officers to take my stubborn client back to the cells to think over his misspent life, and then lectured me about frivolity in the courtroom. Or he could have thrown back his curly head and let out a good strong laugh.

Fortunately for Rafael and me, he laughed. Then he turned to my opponent and said, “How about it, Mr. D.A.? Ms. Jameson says her client can't be doing those double digits. Can we come down a little on this one?”

Howie Rosenthal pursed his thin lips. “If Ms. Jameson's client can't do the time, he shouldn't—”

“Do the crime,” I finished. I rolled my eyes; Judge Rossi said the words that were on the tip of my tongue.

“Cut the clichés, Mr. Rosenthal. What about it?”

Howie drew himself up to his full height—two inches shorter than me—and filled his lungs with air. He was preparing for a speech; Rossi glanced at his watch and gave a small sigh of resignation. He saw his table at Armando's disappearing before his hungry eyes.

Rafael and I were about to unleash the second weapon in our meager arsenal: Howie had absolutely no sense of humor and was much given to pompous prosecutorial speeches.

“Your Honor, the people have offered a very reasonable plea under the circumstances,” he began, “and we think—”

“Counselor,” Judge Rossi cut in, “nine to eighteen will punish him just as effectively as ten to twenty, and we can get that today. We can get it in two minutes, can't we, Ms. Jameson?”

I nodded eagerly. “They don't call me the fastest mouth in Brooklyn for nothing,” I tossed in. Howie glared at me; he'd lost the judge and he knew it. He could insist on ten to twenty and take the case to trial, but if he did, he'd be in Rossi's black book for weeks to come. Maybe months; Armando's had a way of running out of its most mouth-watering specials. If Rossi missed the
osso bucco
there was no telling how long he'd hold a grudge.

I sailed back over to Rafael and put my mouth next to his ear. He smelled of sweat and fear.

Good.

“We got it,” I said. “And the only reason we're getting nine to eighteen is that you gave the judge his only laugh of the day. Maybe the week. So my advice is to jump on this plea before he loses his sense of humor. You admit everything and you won't do double digits.”

He jumped on it. We were out of there by ten to one; Rossi made it to Armando's and Rafael and I achieved a victory of sorts.

As I left the courtroom, Murray Singer's gravel voice echoed in my ear. “So then the rabbi said to the chorus girl …”

I wondered when I'd start telling Borscht Belt jokes to court clerks.

One of my very favorite things about Matt Riordan was his voice. It was as rich and dark as fine Belgian chocolate; it soared into various registers like a well-played bassoon; it was lithe and playful, like a sleek otter. And it was on my answering machine for the first time in two months.

All he said was:
Call me
. Two words; no name, no phone number. I was supposed to recognize the voice and remember the number.

What pissed me off was that of course I did. The voice sent a shiver of anticipation through me. Absence might not have made the heart grow fonder, but it had definitely enhanced the libido.

As for the number, I recalled from memory not only his home number but his office number, his fax number, and his beeper number. This from a woman who has to look up her own mother's—

But would I call? That was the question.

I looked at the phone. The phone looked back at me. Not good. Not good at all. The quintessential female situation: looking at a phone and thinking about Him.

What did he want? Had he realized Taylor was too young for him? Had he too missed our Friday night dinners, each of us telling war stories and judge stories and swapping notes about our respective weeks in court? Did he want to know what I thought of the
New York
magazine article?

There was only one way to find out. I picked up the phone and dialed quickly, before I had time to change my mind. On the first ring I hung up.

If there's one thing in this world I hate, it's feeling like a teenager. I wasn't crazy about it when I was a teenager, but in my forties I really thought I should be able to call a man on the phone without wondering if my voice would sound too eager.

I dialed again and this time I stayed on the line until I heard that voice. “Riordan.”

“Matt?” Why my voice rose inquiringly when the man had just said his name was beyond me. It's the same reflex that makes you push the elevator button even when you've just seen the person next to you push it first.

He didn't make that mistake. “Cass,” he replied, filling the single syllable with a flood of warmth, as though hearing from me was a wonderful surprise.

Terse. To the point. That was the best approach. “I got your message,” I said. “What do you want?”

Was that terse or just rude? I opened my mouth to add something, anything, but I didn't have a chance.

“Would you be free for dinner?”

“Tonight?”

“It could be tonight,” he said. I had a mental picture of him consulting his Rolex. “Shall we say an hour from now, at Tre Scalini?”

An hour. An hour to shower, do my hair, change into a silk blouse—and of course the one I wanted would need ironing, and were my black jeans back from the cleaners? And then there was the subway ride to Little Italy.

“Make it two hours,” I said. He agreed.

I was twenty minutes late. Not only were the jeans at the cleaners, so was the blouse. I tried on four others before I found one that picked up the teal in the embroidered vest that matched my favorite cloisonné earrings.

Date behavior. I was exhibiting definite date behavior, something I hadn't done with regard to Riordan in a long time.

He was sitting at a quiet table in the corner, his face ruddy in the pink light of the tiny lamps on the rose-painted wall. Tre Scalini looked like the inside of an old-fashioned valentine, all lace and Victorian colors and dainty, delicate embellishments.

“One thing about eating with you,” I said, sliding into the seat next to his, “you always know where to get the best clam sauce.”

He laughed. It was an old joke between us, but he laughed anyway. “I guess when your clients are named Scaniello and Cretella, you tend to eat Italian.”

“Good Italian,” I amended. I opened the menu, which was a huge hand-scripted parchment affair. My eyes bypassed the real food and went straight to the section headed
Dolci
. “Does this place still have
tiramisu
to die for?”

He smiled. It was an intimate, amused smile such as a fond father might bestow on a precocious daughter. It took me back to the early days of our acquaintance, when he treated me precisely that way, even though he was only twelve years older than I. As a result, I'd tended to exaggerate the adolescent brashness, while he leaned heavily on the avuncular. We'd outgrown those roles over the years, but we'd returned to them now that things were once again awkward between us.

It wasn't until we had steaming plates of
linguine alla vongole
and an enormous
insalata verde
in front of us that he revealed the purpose of this meeting. I choked on a clam and had to be pounded on the back by an overenthusiastic waiter before I could speak.

“You want me to
what
?”

“You heard me. I want you to represent me. Nick Lazarus is going to have that indictment voted and filed any day now and I need—”

“Riordan, you don't need me. You need Alan Dershowitz. Maybe F. Lee—”

“No, I don't,” he cut in, an amused smile on his face. At least it was meant to be an amused smile; there was a strain around the edges that told me to stop kidding around. “I need you. I need you because you're smart and tough. You don't run away from a fight and you don't think prosecutors walk on water.”

For a wild moment, my heart filled with pride. The pride a daughter feels when Daddy praises her. I let myself slide into fairyland; I pictured myself standing before the federal bench, cross-examining witnesses with laserlike acuity, pleading before a jury with an eloquence that had Juror Number Four dabbing tears from her eyes. Saw myself hitting the big time at last, all thoughts erased of ending my days as a female Murray Singer.

C
HAPTER
T
WO

I'd come prepared on some subconscious level for Matt to ask me to resume our relationship. I hadn't come prepared for this. I went into stall mode, tap dancing until I thought my way clear.

“I haven't done much federal work,” I remarked, as if that were the biggest obstacle to my taking the case.

He waved the objection away with a languid hand gesture; the red stone in his Fordham class ring gleamed in the subdued light of the restaurant. “Courts are courts,” he said. “I can advise you on the more arcane aspects of federal procedure.”

“You sure you don't need someone with a name?” I parried. “Someone with clout,” I went on. “What about Litman? What about Slotnick?” I named the two most prominent, most aggressive Manhattan criminal lawyers I could think of.

He'd begun shaking his head before the first name left my mouth. “No and no,” he said with a finality that had me wondering if he'd already asked and been turned down. “I need a woman, for openers.”

A little warning bell went off in my head. He needed a woman. Why? Because asking a male peer to defend him would be tantamount to stepping down as king of the hill? Because he couldn't let a male lawyer see him scared and vulnerable?

If that was his reasoning, it was not a sound basis for an attorney-client relationship.

He kept talking. “I need someone local. I need someone who doesn't have a reputation as ‘the lawyer of last resort'—which is another way of saying ‘a lawyer who represents the guilty.' I need—”