No Safe Place (25 page)

Across the courtroom, Bridget sat straighter, with a dignity Kerry found touching. At once, he realized that he was the first man in Bridget’s memory ever to speak for her. But when he faced the jury, his last thoughts were of the boy, alone, waiting.

“Please,” he implored them, “tell John Musso that what his father did was wrong. Tell him he was right to save his mother.” Pausing, he looked at each juror in turn, and then he finished gently. “Tell John Musso that, like other boys, he deserves a life.”

Without another word, Kerry sat down.

When the jury instructions were finished and court was adjourned, Kerry said goodbye to Bridget and prepared to face a long night of waiting. Then, to his surprise, he saw Clayton Slade at the back of the courtroom.

“How long were you here?” Kerry asked.

“Some of the mom, most of the kid. All of the closing arguments.”

As usual, his face was inscrutable; Kerry could detect no reaction to what Clayton had witnessed, and had little hope of praise. But he was sure by now that Clayton would be honest and that, for better or worse, his advice would be worthwhile. “Have time for a beer?” Kerry asked.

Clayton nodded. “All right.”

Kerry drove them to McGovern’s, edgy at Clayton’s silence. The bar was beginning to fill; Kerry saw a few looks of surprise at the presence of a black man, which he sensed Clayton absorbing without acknowledgment. They sat at a table in the corner and ordered two beers.

“Well?” Kerry asked.

The question needed no explanation. Clayton sipped his beer and then sat back, looking steadily at Kerry. “You made some mistakes,” he answered. “You worked well with the boy. But Levin’s appeal’s got a decent chance, and you should have brought out on direct
why
Bridget didn’t tell the cops—fear, just like her kid. That was where he began to learn it.”

Both points were so true that it deepened Kerry’s self-doubt. “So,” he said finally, “who wins?”

Behind his glasses, Clayton’s eyes became bright, the first hint of amusement. “Oh,” he answered, “that one’s simple. You do.”

“Why?”

“Your closing argument.” Clayton’s face was serious now. “At first I thought you were over the top, especially when you acted out Musso shouting at his wife. Then I realized the problem was
me
—I’d never try to do what you did, and I’d never seen anything like it. In seconds, you went from an adequate lawyer to connecting with that jury so completely that Levin didn’t matter anymore.” He paused, studying Kerry with open curiosity. “You didn’t rehearse that, did you?”

Feeling less flattered than disconcerted, Kerry shook his head. “I’ll never do it again, either. It just happened.”

Clayton took another swallow of beer, thoughtful. He looked around, as if to ensure their privacy, and then looked back at Kerry. “So,” he asked, “what’s domestic violence to you, anyhow?”

The question was so direct that it took Kerry by surprise; he had never talked about this to anyone. Across the table, Clayton’s look was unabashed. Staring at the bottle of beer in front of him, Kerry found himself saying, “My mother.”

There was a tremor in his voice, Kerry realized. For a moment, Clayton was quiet. “So that’s the answer,” he said simply.

Kerry looked up at him. “What do you mean?”

“Find the thing that you can feel. Because if
you
care, you can make a jury care. That’s the gift you have.”

Kerry felt a great relief—that Clayton would not abuse his confidence with intrusive questions or instant psychoanalysis; that perhaps Kerry might become a better lawyer than he had imagined. And then he realized something else: that beneath Clayton’s quiet intelligence was a deep, ineffable kindness.

“Let me buy you dinner,” Kerry said.

The next afternoon, the jury found Anthony Musso guilty.

For Kerry, the moments following were a blur: the clerk reading the verdict; the polling of the jury; Weinstein setting a date for sentencing. Bridget and John were not there; what Kerry would remember was that Anthony Musso no longer watched anyone but him.

Then two deputies took Musso away, and Kerry went to the witness room.

In the corner, John played intently with a Lego set; he did not look up, as if fearing what Kerry might say. Bridget’s red-rimmed eyes were anxious, her body rigid. Kerry sat across from her.

“Guilty,” he told her.

Her hand went to her throat; for a moment, it seemed that she could not breathe. Then, tentative, she reached across the table and placed her fingers on Kerry’s wrist. “You saved my life,” she said.

“
You
saved your life,” Kerry answered. “You, and John.”

John became still and gave Kerry a sideways glance, as if hesitant to believe. Kerry went to him, kneeling.

Slowly, the boy faced him. “It’s over,” Kerry promised. “He can’t hurt you now.”

John’s blue eyes simply stared at him, as if he had not heard. Then he put his arms around Kerry’s neck and, hugging him fiercely, began to cry without making a sound.

When Kerry returned to his apartment, there were balloons Scotch-taped to the door.

He stood there in surprise, looking for a note, and then opened the door.

The living room was quiet. Slinging his suit coat over his shoulder, Kerry walked to the bedroom.

Meg lay naked across his bed, holding out a glass of champagne. Kerry was startled; this was so unlike Meg that it made him uneasy.

“Congratulations,” she said, and laughed so hard at his expression that she spilled champagne on his sheets.

Bewildered, Kerry took the glass and placed it on his nightstand, next to the bottle she had chilled for them, then he sat beside her. “How did you know?” he asked.

“I called your officemate. Clayton.” She took his hand. “I know how worried you’ve been—the other night you hardly slept. I’m really happy for you, Kerry.”

Kerry looked into her face, and then a sense of well-being overwhelmed his doubts: the Musso case, so all-consuming, was over; Bridget and John were safe, perhaps even saved. His loneliness fell away; Meg had understood, after all, without his needing to explain. And she was here with him.

“So,” she said, “want to go to the movies?”

Smiling, Kerry shook his head.

Meg unknotted his tie; Kerry did the rest. When he was inside her, she wrapped her arms and legs around him, as though she would never let him go.

Their lovemaking was far sweeter than ever before—intense, passionate, without reservations. Afterward, moist and spent, they lay in each other’s arms, Meg’s head on his chest. “I can feel your heartbeat,” she told him.

Perhaps, Kerry thought, the difference was in
him
. Perhaps it
was Meg, patiently waiting all the while, who had caused this. What he knew for certain was that this was what he had always wanted, first for his parents, now for them. “Marry me,” he said.

In the next year, Kerry brought twenty domestic violence cases and won seventeen.

This was a dead end, many of his colleagues warned; the smart move would be to mend relations with Flavio and exit this legal ghetto, any way he could. But Kerry did not listen. He visited battered-women’s shelters; worked with the police; lobbied for more progressive legislation. Forcing himself to become a public speaker—a role that did not come easily—he made the rounds of civic groups to call for compassion for victims, harsher punishment for abusers. He was relentless in pursuing his cause, and for the first time, some labeled him ruthless, too willing to put men in jail to advance his own agenda. Though Kerry found this hurtful and perplexing, he rejected the easiest way to soften the impression others had of him—to talk about his mother. Except to Clayton Slade, he never spoke of his own childhood.

As his involvement deepened, Kerry thought much more about politics, not as a path for his own career—for he did not want the loss of privacy—but because government affected the things that mattered most to him. It was one thing to prosecute abusers case by case, but that did not ensure that their sentences were longer, that there was funding to help their wives, decent day care for their children. He became an early advocate of barring convicted abusers from buying guns; in turn, this
spawned
an incident that some found admirable, others intemperate and even chilling.

Kerry had visited the local office of Ralph Shue, a pompous suburban congressman who was positioning himself to run for the Senate but was also a tacit ally of the gun lobby. Kerry’s proposal was, to him, simple and appealing—surely even advocates of gun ownership would agree that wife beaters should not be armed. Finding Shue evasive, then resistant, Kerry inquired whether donations from the NRA had affected his position. When Shue became angry, Kerry snapped, “Life is cheaper than running for the Senate, isn’t it? Just remember this—the next time one of these animals shoots his wife and kids, you helped him pull the trigger.”

With that, Kerry stalked from Shue’s office, leaving behind an enemy and an anecdote.

The follow-up to this, a conversation with Clayton Slade, was something no one ever heard about. But its effects on Kerry were profound. Over a beer, Clayton said, “Shue’s an asshole. But if you can’t disarm every guy who beats his wife, what about trying to educate them?” His tone grew firm. “They can’t
all
want to be the way they are, Kerry. And even if they do, you come off sounding a little less vengeful.”

Kerry sat back, silent and withdrawn. For him, his father had been the paradigm of violence without reason. Yet by now Kerry knew that many of those he prosecuted had learned rage from their own abusive fathers; he sensed, too, in a way that made him uncomfortable, that his own anger—channeled into prosecutions—mirrored Michael Kilcannon’s. He made no answer to Clayton. But counseling for men who wanted it became part of every speech, scrutiny of his own motives a greater part of Kerry himself.

Vincent Flavio began to watch him. At one of their frequent dinners, Liam Dunn remarked, “Vincent can’t believe you’re doing all this for the exercise. He thinks you may be positioning yourself, and it makes him nervous.” Finishing, Liam looked at Kerry shrewdly, leaving him to wonder if the question was also Liam’s own.

“Why,” Kerry replied, “does Vincent Flavio think everyone wants to be
him
?”

His godfather’s look of appraisal lingered, and then Liam
chose to cover this with a smile. “Vincent’s a wee bit paranoid, Kerry, and your last name
is
Kilcannon. If
he
were you, he’d make some use of it.”

It was the last thing Kerry wanted.

His own contacts with Jamie were infrequent. His brother visited the office only once, making a courtesy call on Vincent Flavio, as cursory as decorum allowed. “An hour with Vincent,” he observed to Kerry, “is an hour closer to being dead, and seems much the same experience.” He paused, glancing around Kerry’s shabby office. “Still, there’s probably something I can say to him. How much more domestic pathos can you stand?”

Kerry simply stared at him. “As much as I have to.”

Jamie gave him a fleeting smile, though his eyes were serious and a little quizzical. “Ah, Kerry,” he said at last, “are you never leaving home?”

Kerry stayed in domestic violence: even if nothing else had held him there, the Musso case would have. After all, he had paid Vincent Flavio to keep it.

By Flavio’s fiat, appeals were handled by lawyers in another section; feeling his responsibility to John and Bridget, Kerry wanted—even needed—to handle the Musso appeal himself. But when he went to the head of the appellate section, the reply was “If you want to keep the Musso case, go see Carl Nunzio.”

Reluctantly, Kerry did so.

The amusement in Nunzio’s eyes, heightened by a hint of malice, reminded Kerry of the day he had refused to pay Flavio’s tribute, and Nunzio had exiled him to domestic violence. At length, Nunzio said, “You’re asking for a favor, Kerry? Then it’s time you joined the team.”

Kerry stifled his own rage. There was Meg to consider, he told himself: in a few months, they would marry. But it was not Meg he envisioned as he weighed his answer; it was the look on John Musso’s face, just before he wrapped his arms around Kerry’s neck.

Slowly, Kerry nodded.

Nunzio smiled. “If it will make things a little easier,” he said, “maybe Essex County can give you a raise. In the public interest, of course.”

Leaving, Kerry felt dirtier than before.

As months passed, and the time for arguing the Musso appeal drew closer, Kerry kept in touch with Bridget and John.

In many ways, their lives were difficult; without income from Anthony’s construction jobs, they were poor, and Bridget’s health problems and lack of skills made her depend on public assistance. But she stayed sober, and John’s school attendance was far better. One Sunday, Kerry took them to Manhattan to visit the zoo in Central Park; Bridget seemed almost serene, and though quiet and still guarded, John plainly had come to depend on her. She was taking courses in bookkeeping, Bridget told Kerry; she had a facility with numbers, and John’s grades in mathematics suggested that he possessed it too. Their lives were far different than with Anthony, and Kerry believed they would be better yet. It was one achievement of which he felt proud.

Another was his friendship with Clayton Slade.

In time, Kerry acquired a sense of his friend’s life. Clayton was the son of a silent and unloving city bureaucrat and a well-meaning but somewhat feckless mother; observant from youth, Clayton viewed both parents with detachment. His deep capacity for affection was channeled toward his wife, Carlie, sharp-tongued and irreverent, and their rambunctious five-year-old twin daughters. “The coven” was what Clayton called them, in a dry way that confirmed, rather than concealed, how much they meant to him.

The Slade family lived at the edge of Vailsburg, a few blocks from Mary Kilcannon. One of Kerry’s pleasures was going to their home for dinner: he and Clayton felt no need to force conversation; Carlie came to treat Kerry much as she treated Clayton, with a certain wry affection; Kerry discovered from the twins—Kelsey and Marissa—how much he wanted children. He loved them for their sense of play. One night, rounding up the troops for dinner, Carlie had found Kerry in her clothes closet, hiding on his hands and knees behind her dresses, the object of the twins’ elaborate game of hide-and-seek. “Well,” she said with raised eyebrows, “at least you’re not
wearing
one. But if either of those girls asked you, you probably would.”