Mean Streak (29 page)

I wanted that to be someone else's fault.

“What happens now?” Annie asked. She pushed a strand of hair from her forehead and looked at me with the weary gaze you see in Walker Evans photographs. Her thin arms, drawn face, shapeless print dress, all added to the illusion that she was a Dust Bowl wife worrying about how to feed the young'uns. “Who do you tell about this?”

“Warren Zebart, I guess. He's the FBI agent who—”

“I know who he is, for God's sake,” Annie cut in. She took a deep breath, let it out in a long sigh, and asked, “Do you have to tell him?”

I nodded. “You know I do.” I tried for a gentle tone, but no amount of gentleness would soften the facts.

She smiled a secret smile. “They'll never find the gun,” she said in a childish voice. “I threw it in the river.”

I gave that assertion some thought, then shook my head. “No, you didn't. Not that night, anyway.”

Her eyes widened. “Why do you say that?”

“Because no woman is going to walk to the East River in the middle of the night, throw a gun into the water, and walk back alone. Not at one in the morning. Whatever you did with that gun,” I finished, “it is not in the river.”

Her smile widened but held no amusement. “It's in the water, though.”

In the water. We were standing on an island. The amount of water available for throwing guns into was—

Then I had it. Where else would a grieving widow get rid of the gun she'd used to kill her late husband's best friend?

To the place where her husband had sat in his car, watched the sun come up over the bay, and shot himself in the head.

“You threw it off Orient Point,” I said.

She nodded.

“Zebart will have the area dragged,” I said. “He'll find the gun.” I sounded more confident than I felt.

“I know,” she replied. “I suppose I've always known I wasn't really going to get away with it. But I felt better as soon as Eddie was dead. I really did feel better. I stood there at the top of the courthouse steps and I looked at all that blood and Eddie's brains splashed on the white stone wall, and I felt great. I felt powerful. I felt like I could float right down without touching the steps with my feet. I felt alive for the first time since all the trouble began. Can you understand that?”

I nodded.

“You know what I hated most?” Annie went on. “That stupid nickname: Ike. That stupid fucking nickname.” She fixed me with her serious gray eyes. “My husband let another man tell him what his name was. Can you imagine anything more pathetic? He let another man give him his name.”

Fat Jack sat in the last booth, a doll-sized cup of espresso in front of him. The cup was flanked by a bottle of sambuca capped with an aluminum nozzle. He nodded me into the booth with the air of a cardinal granting permission to approach. Or perhaps it was the late Don Scaniello the ex-bail bondsman was imitating.

I slid into the red leather banquette and signaled the waiter for my own demitasse. I'd have preferred cappuccino, but somehow it seemed important to match the fat man drink for drink, to spice my coffee with the licorice-flavored liqueur and sip the way they did in the old country. Neither of us was Italian, but the atmosphere of Forlini's settled over us and added a layer of intricate Machiavellian nuance to our every gesture, our every word.

“Tell me again why you wouldn't testify,” I said after Fat Jack had poured a shot into my cup. I lifted it to my lips; the flavors of strong coffee and sambuca lingered on my lips like a Judas kiss. I was here to get the truth about Riordan, and I'd known from the minute I walked in the door it wasn't a truth I was going to like.

“I told you,” the fat man replied in a rasping voice. “I told you you wouldn't like what I'd have to say.”

“And then you told me Riordan ordered you to pay off Eddie Fitz,” I reminded him. “But that was a lie, wasn't it? Riordan's not stupid enough to fall for a scam like Eddie's; he never gave you money to pay Eddie off.”

“So why did I pay him, then?” Fat Jack asked. His pudgy fingers enclosed the tiny china cup. The huge restaurant was all but empty; the legal lunch crowd was back in court.

“I'm not sure you did,” I replied. “I know why you said you did, though. Because you and Eddie were in it from the start. You didn't jump over to Lazarus' side because you found that internal memo—you were on Eddie's team the whole time. The memo was just a pretext, a cover for the real truth.”

“And just what is that real truth?”

I sat back in the booth, letting the quiet of the place settle over me, calming my nerves.

“Everyone kept saying how remarkable it was that Eddie knew when to wear a wire and when to leave it off,” I pointed out. “Lazarus said it, Singer said it, and so did the judge—hell, Eddie himself said it. But what if it wasn't instinct? What if he knew damned well when to leave the wire off because he knew for a fact he'd be searched that night?”

“How would he know that, Ms. Jameson?” Fat Jack made a good straight man. For a moment I wondered whether his willingness to let me spin my little yarn meant that I was completely wrong in my conclusions. I decided there was only one way to find out, and plunged ahead.

“Because the person responsible for conducting the search made a practice of telling him in advance,” I said. “You and Eddie talked before every meeting. You told him whether or not you were going to search him, and he wore a wire or not, depending on what you said.”

“Why would I do that?” The fat man's hands were still. He waited with the patience of a Buddha, his face expressionless. He was a tough room; I began for the first time to doubt the reasonableness of my own conclusions. “For that matter,” he went on, “why would Eddie do that?”

That question I had an answer for. “Eddie knew his days as king of the street were numbered,” I theorized. “He knew the squad was being investigated, and he knew it was only a matter of time before someone cracked and the whole bunch of them went down. He decided he wasn't going down—that his only option was to beat the other guys to the prosecutor's office and turn state's evidence. That's why he sucked up to Lazarus during the commission hearings, why he dared Lazarus to go after lawyers and judges. He saw himself as the star witness, bringing down other guys instead of being marched out of some precinct with his jacket over his head. He decided to go from corrupt cop to Hero Cop—but a hero needs an enemy. A hero needs to put himself in danger. So you played the heavy.” A flicker lit the gray eyes in the piggish face. “Pardon the pun,” I said without a smile.

“Guys like Lazarus,” Fat Jack said, “always fall in love with cops. See, that's the thing I always liked about Matty. He could stand toe-to-toe with the kneecappers and he never flinched. He never stood in awe of those fuckers, either—never hero-worshipped bastards like Frankie C. or cops like Eddie. Matty was a street fighter in a three-piece suit; he wasn't awed by tough guys. But a guy like Lazarus—Nicky creamed his pants whenever Eddie told a war story. He loved it when Eddie went out wired, put his life on the line to make his case. He ate it up the night Paulie and I held the gun to Eddie's throat. Eddie was golden from then on.”

“And that was the point,” I said. “Eddie had a closetful of skeletons, and he knew the only way to insure that Lazarus wouldn't throw him to the wolves when he found out about those skeletons was to let Lazarus think he was risking his life to make the case against Riordan. That way Lazarus would always owe Eddie, would think twice about holding him responsible for all the stuff he did on the street.”

“It worked, didn't it?” Jack asked.

“You explained why Eddie did it,” I said, “but you haven't told me yet why you went along with it.”

“Why don't you guess?” my companion retorted with a sneer.

“All right,” I replied. This was the part I was least certain about—and the part I wanted least to discuss and to face. But I'd promised myself the full truth. I'd stood in judgment on Annie Cohagan Straub for refusing to face the full truth about the man she'd loved, and I was damned if I was going to keep on doing the same thing.

“It all starts with Nunzie Aiello,” I said. My espresso was cold; I took a sip anyway.

“What do you know about Nunzie?”

“I know Frankie Cretella didn't kill him,” I responded. “I know the person who did went to a lot of trouble to make it look like a mob hit, a replica of the Scaniello murder.”

“Nunzie's old business,” the fat man pronounced.

“Maybe,” I agreed. “But you drew the line at murder, didn't you? You'd fetched and carried for Matt Riordan for thirty years, but you drew the line at murder.”

I wasn't certain exactly when I'd come to believe that my ex-lover and ex-client had killed Nunzie, but I knew that Taylor's story of how he'd been late to his own birthday party had something to do with it. Nunzie had gone missing in October, just about the time Matt would have been celebrating. And Frankie C. was on record as telling the world he wasn't going to rescue his lawyer from Nunzie's treachery.

“I couldn't see ratting him out for it, though,” the bail bondsman said. “That I couldn't see. But when Eddie Fitz came along with his little scam, I thought, what the hell? Matty deserves some punishment for what he did to Nunzie. Why not help Lazarus nail him for bribery, when the God's honest truth is, he's bribed in his time. Which I didn't care much about then or now, but whacking Nunzie—the guy was an inoffensive little schnook who was trying to save his own ass. He didn't deserve to wind up as worm food in the trunk of a car.”

“You never asked.”

This was true. I had never asked. I'd plunged into Riordan's defense on the bribery case without bothering to ascertain whether he had, in fact, killed Nunzie Aiello. I'd accepted his explanation that the whole idea of his being responsible for Nunzie was a delusion on the part of Nick Lazarus, an obsession of a demented FBI agent.

I had never asked. But this didn't mean he'd had no obligation to tell.

I said as much as I stood in the parlor of Riordan's office suite. I stood because I wasn't sure I wanted to sit, wasn't sure I wanted to share an intimate chat and a drink with a man I now knew to be a stone killer.

I now knew. I now knew what I hadn't wanted to know.

From the beginning, I'd known what Matt was. I'd hopped on for the ride anyway, refusing to let his reputation deter me from pursuing whatever it was we had together.

Why?

Because I'd always loved roller coasters.

“How?” I asked. I was keeping my words to a bare minimum, as though by opening my mouth to speak I ran the risk of filling my lungs with poisoned air.

“Will you please sit?” Riordan's voice carried an edge of annoyance. “I hate the way you're standing there like the Angel of Judgment.”

The exotic blooms in the blown-glass vase were shriveling. There were little brown edges on the pale-peach lilies. In the old days, Matt changed the flowers every other day, throwing out the whole bouquet and starting fresh. In the old days, there were three or four law students doing research in the library, two receptionists covering the phone, Kurt Hallengren handling the preliminary court appearances. Now it was just Matt and the decaying flowers.

His career would never recover from the body blows struck by Nick Lazarus. The people who wanted Matt to represent them wanted a winner, and Matt was beginning to carry the smell of defeat, even if he had beaten the rap.

He'd been right; winning wasn't enough. He'd won the verdict, but he'd lost in the long run.

“How?” I said again, as I slid into the armchair beside the drop-leaf table.

“Let me give you a drink,” Matt said. He rose and went to the bar. “You always say it's too hot to drink Scotch in summer, but you'll like this.”

He brought back a huge blown glass with a half-inch of amber liquid inside. I sipped and let the warmth surge through me like a jolt of electricity. “Nice,” I said. “Thanks.”

I was drinking with a killer. A killer who wore an Armani suit and tasseled Gucci loafers with black silk socks that covered his calf.

But the bright-headed bird had lost some of his luster. The blue eyes were red-rimmed and the jowls hung loosely in spite of his plastic jobs.

“Do you really want to know, babe?” he asked. His face was impassive, but his eyes begged me to stop asking questions. “Isn't it better to just—”

“No,” I cut in. “I really want to know. I think you owe me that much.” Which was a stupid thing to say, since he owed me nothing besides my fee. I'd made a pretty penny representing my former lover, but beyond that, he owed me no explanations and we both knew it.

“I'd saved his ass,” Riordan said. “I'd gotten him off on at least five petty beefs before the Lou Berger case. And on that one, I'd done what I could. I didn't think he'd sell me out, I really didn't. Even when I first heard Lazarus was going after him, trying to turn him against me, I didn't think Nunzie would bite. He was a soldier of the old school, Nunz, and I thought he'd stand up.”

“You thought he'd stand up,” I repeated. “Isn't that what Dwight Straub said about Eddie Fitz? ‘He's a standup guy.' Interesting,” I went on, “how that same phrase is used by both the cops and the bad guys.”

“Another reason I wasn't really worried,” Riordan continued, “is that I talked to Frankie C. I figured Frankie wasn't going to let Nunzie start running off at the mouth.”

“You mean,” I translated, “you hoped Frankie C. would take out Nunzie on his own account.”

“You might say that,” Riordan acknowledged.

“Look, we're not on tape. Let's just talk straight, shall we?” I picked up the glass and let a little Scotch oil my tongue. It burned like a delicious fire.