Mean Streak (20 page)

I broke off as a sudden revelation hit me. What had Zebart testified to about Eddie? That he'd never seen anyone with such an unerring sense of when to wear a wire and when to leave the equipment back in the office. It was as if Eddie had radar, the FBI man had said. It was as if he'd known in advance when Fat Jack was going to search him.

It was as if he'd known in advance
.

What if he
had
known in advance? What if he and Fat Jack had orchestrated their little dance, the ballet of trust and distrust that led to the damning tapes?

But why?

Because Eddie Fitz was a liar. He was no hero cop; he was a crooked cop who wanted to cut a deal that would let him walk away from his misconduct while his buddies served time. And the best way to do that was to turn state's evidence before anyone else thought of doing it.

“Jack found a memo,” I remarked. I told Matt what the bondsman had told me about the internal memorandum from Lazarus to an undercover cop. “So at least part of the time he was pretending to believe Eddie, Jack knew the truth. He was on the prosecution's payroll.”

“That's why they didn't call Jack to the stand,” Riordan said in an authoritative tone. “If they presented him as a witness, they'd have had to give us that information.”

“I don't know where this gets us,” I continued. “I feel as if every time I acquire another piece of information, it turns to garbage. I mean, we know for a fact that Eddie Fitz is a crooked cop, and that Nick Lazarus knew it and put him on the stand anyway, and let him lie through his teeth—and we have no more concrete evidence of any of that than we did the day we first learned about it.”

We sat in McSorley's until the sun made its way below the horizon. As I walked with Matt toward the subway that would take me back to Brooklyn, I watched the huge red ball slowly descending into the Hudson, hanging in the sky like a Japanese lantern, sending long, slanting rays of orange light along the streets. There was a wispy breeze off the East River. The street was alive with people. Lovers of all ages and gender combinations strolled hand in hand, lazing their way along Third Avenue past Indian restaurants and boutiques devoted to leather in all its various forms. Musicians plucked guitars or played South American pipes or fiddled in front of open cases with a buck or two lying inside to encourage passers-by to toss in more cash. In front of the Ukranian restaurant a mime imitated people as they walked by; I smiled as he picked up Matt's intense stride, jutting his head forward as though to cut his way through the very air around us.

There was a doleful little tune playing in my head. It had been there ever since McSorley's, nagging at me until I managed to identify it. It was a folk song, something about a boat. Something about a big lake they called Gitche Gumee.

I gave a wry little laugh when the title came to me: “The Wreck of the
Edmund Fitzgerald
.” It was a long, lugubrious ballad about the sinking of a Lake Superior barge, sung by Gordon Lightfoot.

The wreck of the
Edmund Fitzgerald
. Was I thinking of the wreck Eddie Fitz had made of his own life, or of the others he had taken down with him to the bottom of the lake?

Back in Brooklyn, I had messages on my answering machine and a spew of faxes to read through. I was about to toss them into the pile I'd mentally marked “After Trial,” when a reference to Eddie Fitz caught my attention. I sat down on my red leather office chair and began to read.

“Do you really think Eddie is that stupid?” the fax began. “Do you think he'd talk to Nick Lazarus without protecting himself? Well, he wouldn't. He wore a wire and he made a tape of everything he said. He kept the tape in the barbecue in his backyard so no one would find it. Only I found it, and I can give it to you in return for two thousand dollars. Meet me tonight in front of St. Andrew's Church at 11:00. Don't be late—and bring all the money.”

There was no signature. The heading identified the sender as a public copy shop in the courthouse district of lower Manhattan. It was not the first such offer I'd received since the trial began. It seemed as if the entire population of Manhattan wanted to help me win Matt's case—for a small, eminently reasonable fee, of course. But this was different. For one thing, whoever had written this knew Eddie's penchant for taping his own conversations. For another, we needed all the ammunition we could get to make good our promise to show the judge that Lazarus had bent the rules.

I called Matt and read the fax to him over the phone. “I'll be right there,” he said in a tight, excited voice. “A half-hour at the most.”

I walked upstairs to my apartment and stripped off my working clothes. After tossing the sweat-damp pantyhose into the sink for a quick wash, I slipped into jogging shorts and put on the fish-on-a-bicycle T-shirt. Then I trudged back downstairs and left a note for Matt to ring the apartment bell instead of the office. It was too damned late and too damned hot to keep it professional. I opened a diet soda and stretched out on the couch.

I was half-asleep by the time my client rang the bell. I buzzed him up, and set the fax on the coffee table for him to read. I met him at the door with a cold beer.

“Where is it?” he said by way of greeting. I gestured toward the coffee table and stood back.

“This could be good,” he said after a minute. “This could be very good.”

“This could also be a complete crock,” I pointed out. “A wild-goose chase, a waste of time, a scam, a fraud, a blackmail scheme, a—”

“I know all that,” Matt interrupted, “but it could also be just what we need. Think about it,” he urged. He tossed the fax back onto the coffee table and began to pace the living room. “We know Eddie Fitz made a tape of his Psych Services interview, in defiance of Police Department regulations. So is it wholly out of the realm of possibility that he sneaked a tape recorder into Nick Lazarus' office and taped his conversations there?”

I shook my head. “Not completely,” I replied, giving Matt what he wanted. “That does sound like something Eddie might do.”

“Of course it does,” Matt said approvingly. “Because if we manage to nail Eddie Fitz as a liar, you and I both know Lazarus is going to turn on him. He'll tell the court he never had a moment's suspicion about Eddie, but now that he knows the truth, he'll rush straight to the grand jury and indict the former Hero Cop. And Eddie's just smart enough to know that the best way to guarantee that won't happen is to have his own insurance policy; namely, a tape of Lazarus listening to every horrible thing Eddie ever did on the street.”

“I understand all that,” I said, not liking the excited undercurrents in Matt's voice. “What I don't believe is that this anonymous faxer has any such tapes. Why would Eddie leave them around where someone else could find them that easily? And who is this person, and what does he really want?”

“He wants two thousand bucks,” my client retorted.

It came to me as I contemplated Matt's too-smooth skin that he'd had plastic surgery. He'd had a face lift. And maybe an eye job. And a tummy tuck—Was that why his stomach still looked flat as a washboard?

“Is that all he wants?” I asked in a soft voice. “Can you be sure he doesn't want something you're not going to want to give?”

“All I know,” Matt replied, “is that come eleven
P.M.,
I'm going to be standing in front of St. Andrew's Church. If I'm wasting my time, so be it. It's my time.”

We agreed to meet at 7:15 the next morning, outside the courthouse at the round metal tables next to the food booths, to discuss the results of his night's activities.

It was late. And hot. And the air conditioning felt good and so did the gins and tonic I made and so did sitting on the couch tucked neatly into Matt's sinewy arm, the television soothing us with a meaningless flow of images we scarcely noticed. He smelled so good; he had always smelled so good: a combination of male sweat and citrusy after-shave that roused something inside me.

His hand brushed the front of my T-shirt and stiffened my braless nipple. The arm around my shoulders squeezed me close to him. I gave a contented sound and let my hand travel across his shirt. The hair on his broad chest felt springy under my fingertips; I wanted to reach in and pet him like a dog.

He reached down and covered my mouth with his lips. His meaty hand crept under my T-shirt and cupped my breast as he thrust his tongue into my willing mouth.

A hot rush of desire flooded me; I wanted the release, the closeness, the sound of his breath as he lay on my bed next to me, the touch of his manicured hands on my skin, the give and take of good, strong sex, the—

I wanted him.

And in very short order, I gave myself what I wanted.

The sex was great. Raw, animal passion that released a lot of the tension I'd been under. I lay on sweat-soaked sheets, my fingers idly roaming through the hairs on Matt's chest, the cool blast of air conditioning wafting over my satisfied body.

“It's too bad you have to go,” I said. “But I guess you're right. You have to go meet this guy, whoever he is. You won't be satisfied unless you—”

His hand grabbed mine too tightly. “Ah, babe, let's cut the shit. It doesn't matter what this guy has. I'm finished, and we both know it.”

I sat upright in bed. “What are you talking about? We have Eddie Fitz on the ropes and Lazarus in the hot seat. You have a really good chance of winning this thing.”

“I told you from the beginning,” he said, his deep blue eyes focused on my face, “winning wasn't going to be enough.”

I was getting nettled. “Then what would be enough? A public apology from Nick Lazarus? A medal from the mayor?” I smiled; there used to be a judge in Brooklyn who said that to all the criminal lawyers when they argued bail motions.
What does your client want, Counselor, a medal
?

But Matt wasn't smiling. He heaved a sigh. “There's an old courthouse story I used to tell,” he began. “Always got a laugh with it, too. There's a criminal lawyer on trial with a dead loser of a case. But he cross-examines, he objects, he argues—he puts on a show. And when he's finished, his client looks at him and says, “This is wonderful. We're really doing great.'”

I knew where this was going, but I kept quiet and let Matt go for the punch line.

“The lawyer turns to his client and says, ‘No, moron.
I'm
doing great;
you're
going down the toilet.'”

“But you're not going down the toilet.”

“My life is,” he replied, in a voice that wavered. He turned his face away, not quite burying it in the pillow, but with a decisiveness that told me not to come any closer.

Part of me figured he was just crashing from his earlier high, which had been fueled by alcohol, adrenaline, and optimism. And part of me knew exactly what he meant.

“You'll get your life back,” I promised, working to exude a confidence I didn't entirely feel. “Once all this is over, you'll be turning clients away, just like you used to.”

He cleared his throat and swallowed the phlegm in a throaty gurgle. His voice was thick with what I hoped to hell weren't unshed tears. “No, babe,” he said. “Clients like the ones I had don't give replays. When they're gone, they're gone. And as far as they're concerned, I'm yesterday. Kurt's their lawyer now. And maybe he can keep Frankie C. happy and maybe he can't, but I'll never see a Cretella case again.”

“So you'll—”

Now his voice was back to its full, round timbre. It rang with authority as he cut in: “Save the locker-room speech, Cass. I know what I know.”

He reached over and stroked my naked flesh, raising goose bumps as his fingers touched sensitive spots. “I've got to go. Thanks, Cass,” he said. “Thanks a lot.”

“I hope you get what you need,” I replied. It sounded inadequate as hell, but it was what I hoped.

It was only later that the irony of those words came home to me.

The F station at East Broadway was deep underground; it was the first stop in Manhattan, and the sense of having been underneath the East River was overwhelming. The station was deep and damp and cool, as if I were stepping out of the subway car straight into riverbed.

I climbed toward the sunlight and emerged from darkness at the corner of East Broadway and Canal Street, on the northern edge of Chinatown. It took a moment for my eyes to adjust to the light. It was going to be another hot day, and the sun streamed down on the tenement houses, glinted off windows and fire escapes and the triangular gold top of the federal courthouse, visible along the straight line of East Broadway.

From Canal Street, the courthouse looked like a castle, gold and remote and beckoning. It was a place of fantasy, a place to spin tales about.

As recently as last week, that courthouse had been a place of mystery to me. And now I walked up the smooth stone steps every day, stood under the high ceilings and addressed a judge on the high, polished bench.

It was only seven in the morning, but the street was already bustling. Delivery trucks were double-parked in front of Chinese restaurants and groceries; huge plastic bags filled to bursting with bean sprouts and tofu cakes sat on the sidewalk, leaking water in little rivulets that ran toward the curb. I stepped gingerly around the puddles, taking in the exotic sights and smells. I passed a Chinese herbalist, with unlabeled glass jars in the window. One jar held flat, dried lizards.
Take two lizards and call me in the morning
, I joked to myself.

I passed underneath the huge brown bulk of the Manhattan Bridge, grateful for a temporary respite from the sun. On the opposite side of the street I noticed a building that still had Hebrew letters carved above the door. A former synagogue, perhaps; this was part of the legendary Lower East Side of Manhattan.

There were little hole-in-the-wall eateries with whole smoked ducks hanging in the windows; juices dripped into pans directly under the ducks, which were destined to be wrapped in rice pancakes and smothered with
hoisin
sauce. There were newspaper stands with Chinese papers and bright red greeting cards with gold calligraphy. There were tourist stores with dusty Buddhas in the windows and backscratchers hanging outside. Asian schoolgirls in plaid uniform skirts walked three abreast, cradling books in their arms like babies. Old women shuffled by in cotton slippers, wearing sweaters in spite of the growing heat. In the street, horns honked and drivers swore at one another.