Rough Justice (10 page)

I cleaned the blood from my jaw and pushed out of the bathroom. A tart mist of disinfectant floated in the bedroom air. Lansing had put the place to rights, more or less. Swiped up the vomit. Made the bed. She'd even laid a shirt and a pair of slacks out on the quilt for me. I shuffled over to them like an old man. I began the long, complex chore of stuffing myself into them.

The smell was better in the other room by the time I stumbled into it. Lansing was frying eggs in a panful of spattering butter. The pot on the coffeemaker was filled. The broiler door was open and I could see toast cooking on the middle rack.

I wandered to the kitchenette counter, leaned on it. Glanced over my shoulder at the floor. Lansing had taken up the police tape, the outline of Thad Reich. I turned to her, tried to say something.

She didn't listen. She dashed some coffee in a mug with the swift accuracy of a former counter-girl. Banged the mug down on the counter in front of me. Turned back to the stove. I leaned into the steam of it. My stomach did a barrel roll. I braved the nausea, and took a sip. Slowly, my guts eased in for a landing. The balloon between my ears began to deflate a little.

“Oh man,” I said.

“Some drunk,” said Lansing.

“The drunk was fine. The hangover stinks.”

“You're lucky I got to you.”

“Yeah, what are friends for if they can't shake you till you throw up?”

“It was for your own good. I've been trying to find you for days. I've been trying to wake you up for hours.”

“Maybe I didn't want to be found. Maybe I didn't want to wake up.”

“Too bad. I had to get the super to let me in.” She spun around, slapped one of my best plastic dishes onto the counter. The eggs on it gawked at me. Lansing slid two slices of white toast next to them.

She handed me a fork. “Eat the eggs.”

“I don't want any eggs.”

“Eat the eggs or I will kill you, Wells.”

“Yeah? How will I know I'm dead?”

“The pain will stop. Eat the eggs.”

I clipped a wedge of white from a corner and put it on my tongue. It sat there. I drank some coffee, washed it down to my stomach. It sat there. I groaned. Tried it again.

Lansing leaned on the counter opposite me. Her blue eyes bore into me as I tipped the mug back, gasped out of it, set it down.

“Now, listen to me,” she said. “You've got to stop torturing yourself.”

“And change my whole way of life?”

“I'm serious. You haven't got the time for it. The cops are off the record saying it's beginning to look like murder. Gottlieb says Watts is onto something, he doesn't know what. He says it won't take much to force the D.A.'s hand. Once there's an indictment …”

“I know.”

“It's catch-up ball.”

“I said I know.”

“You don't act like you know.”

“Well, I know, all right?”

“Good,” she said. “Because your self-pity is just meat for that bastard. Eat your eggs.”

I toyed with my eggs some more while Lansing poured more coffee. I sawed off a bigger hunk this time and managed to swallow it without too much effort. Then I tossed the fork to the plate. I pinched the bridge of my nose, closed my eyes.

“Well, that's no good,” said Lansing.

“It works for me,” I said.

It was a second or two before I could look up again. When I did, I turned away from her, toward the window above my desk. Outside, the spring weather had turned sour. The sky over Eighty-sixth Street was gray. The window pane was streaked with a thin, steady rain. Judging by the light, it seemed to be midmorning.

“Okay. Give me the rest of this.”

“It's bad, rotten. We're all for you on the floor, but the People Upstairs have more or less written you off. I don't know which of their emotions is involved—greed or fear—but every day they don't clear your name—every day they don't build a statue to you in Central Park—Bush comes closer to suspending you. The commissioner's on him and the cops are backing him. They don't much like Watts, but they don't want him tried in the media.”

“Why not? We're a hell of a lot faster than Internal Affairs.”

She smiled with one corner of her mouth. Straightened and turned to the cupboard for another mug. I turned from the window to watch her. She was wearing a yellow turtleneck sweater and tight light blue jeans. It was good to see her move in them. She talked without facing me.

“To her credit, Miss Dog Food of Madison Avenue has been standing up for you. So they tell me, anyway. The word is she's practically used up her honeymoon period fighting the suspension. In that perky way of hers that's apparently so endearing.”

She slapped some coffee into a mug for herself, and another dose for me. She looked up and caught me studying her. She smiled again, then leaned back against the oven, hiding the smile behind her mug.

“At least you're still alive,” she said.

“Yeah, I have it all over Thad Reich in that department.”

She clunked the mug down on the stove behind her. “All right. That's enough,” she said. “That's plenty. I don't know why, but that Ivy League punk tried to off you, darling. You want to sit around here and drink, or you want to find out what's going on?”

“I want to sit around here and drink. Damn it!” I slapped the counter with an open hand. The coffee sloshed out of my mug. The fork clattered on the plate. “I can't believe they won't run the Watts piece. I
had
him. I had that bastard dead to rights.” I clenched my fist. “That gets me. That's what gets me.
Him
after
me
. Christ!”

“Well, that's how it is. You want to live with it or not?”

“I want to sit around and drink. I thought we covered that.”

But Lansing was moving now. Striding out of the kitchenette into the living room. I watched her as she stepped right across the spot where young Thad had choked to death. She went to the desk by the window. Snatched her purse from the desktop. Snapped it open and yanked out one of her notebooks.

She flipped the thin book open as she paced out to the center of the room.

“Here's what there is so far,” she said. “First of all, Thad Reich … Did you get this from the papers?”

“Probably, but let's do it sober.”

“A Yale man.”

“That I remember.”

“From Somerville, Mass. Father a district sales head for National Foods. Mother a housewife and part-time nurse with two daughters.” She glanced up at me. “They're decent people, it seems like. Racked up—well, the way you'd figure. You know, they're not too sophisticated. They don't seem … They can't understand …”

“Why the man who killed their son hasn't been busted for murder.”

She looked at her notes again. “They won't talk to us, anyway. And now they're pretty much shut off from everyone, in mourning, all that. They gave a couple of interviews right at the start. Nothing much.”

“Yeah, I saw one Molly Caldwell used.”

“That bitch. She's in my book for this. I talked to Wallace in TV. Wait'll next year. Where was I?” The flush faded from her cheeks as she surveyed the page, lifted it, surveyed another.

I spotted a cigarette pack on the other side of the counter. Snagged one, poked it between my lips.

“Okay,” Lansing said. “So he's a smart kid, apple of his mother's eye, no enemies, la la la … Okay. Goes to Yale. MBA. Out he comes and he heads to Wall Street. Did you finish the eggs?”

I cupped my hands around a match as it flared. “I thought he was Mr. Charity Worker. Where's Wall Street come in?”

She sighed. “Well, that's the thing. Two years ago, Reich comes to town, following what seems to be his destiny. In six months, he's one of the hot Young Turks at Bennett-Dreiser. In a year, he's washing the sores of lepers.”

“Did they bury him?”

“What?”

“Reich. Did they have his funeral?”

“Yeah. Up in Massachusetts. Are you listening to me?”

“I was just wondering.” I held the cigarette to my mouth with a trembling hand. “All right, so first he's a money man, then he's a saint. What happened?”

Lansing lifted a hand, let it fall to her hip. “A spokesman for B-D said something like, ‘Thad was not cut out for the fast-paced life of today's financial market.'”

“He said that?”

“I know. It sounds so much like bullshit, but I can't find any dirt.”

“SEC? Ciccelli?”

“Nothing. He didn't have time to get in trouble. He came, he saw, he fled.”

“What's his wife say?”

“She won't talk. She was up in Mass. for the funeral, then came straight back. No comment anywhere.”

“So he turns his back on a life of wealth to help the homeless, and he's clean. I'm fucked.”

“Well, wait.” Lansing flipped over a notebook page, scanned the book eagerly. She took two steps to the right, two to the left, two to the right again. I watched her, the shape of her moving in the sweater, in the jeans. I thought about her cleaning up the mess in the bedroom. “Okay,” she said. “Celia Cooper.”

“The woman who ran the shelter. Watts mentioned her. She loved Reich. ‘What a loss.'”

“Right. And she goes along with the Bennett-Dreiser guy. She says basically Reich found the Wall Street life empty and—‘spiritually unsatisfying,' she said—and started working for her to try to make sense of things.”

“I killed Gandhi.”

She stopped pacing, one leg out, one hip jutting. “Look. I figure there are two possibilities. One is that Reich was robbing your apartment and you surprised him. Now, given the facts that you have nothing and he wanted nothing, that seems pretty unlikely.”

“What's the other possibility?”

“That there's some connection between you two.”

“I never heard of him.”

“No.” She took a long stride until she stood beside me. I could smell her scent again. It did not make me sick anymore. “But you have heard of Cooper. The shelter she runs is the Cooper House.”

“In River City. Yeah, sure. I've heard of it. So what?”

“So you covered it.”

“Cooper House?”

There was a loose sheet clipped into her notebook. She pulled it out, handed it to me. I unfolded it, looked it over. It was a printout of a piece under my byline:
BD OF EST GIVES SHELTER OKAY.
A few column inches that had run in the metro section. I handed it back to her.

“That was five years ago, Lancer.”

She stood over me, glaring down. “I tried to get a private interview with Celia Cooper. To ask her if there was anything about Reich that would help us. Know what she said? ‘If John Wells wants to dish up dirt on that fine young man to save his hide, let him do it himself.'”

“But this board thing wasn't even my story. I picked it up for Stertz, I think, 'cause his wife was sick.”

“If Watts sends you to prison for life,” Lansing said, “I marry for money.”

I laughed. The pain of it echoed up and down me. I ran my hand up through my hair.

“All right,” I said. “All right. I'll check it out.”

10

The rich of River City always look to the west. The collection of elegant brick towers on Manhattan's East Side hangs over one of the best river views in town. But in the twenties, when the complex was built, the East River was not as pleasant to look at as it is today. Where the United Nations Building now stands—its gleaming tower, its fluttering circle of flags, its shady park—there were only slaughterhouses, maybe a few breweries. Chester Daniels, the millionaire developer who erected the complex, built its apartments to face away from the water. The eyes of the wealthy would not see, their noses would not smell, the dirty business going on behind their backs.

Daniels arranged for the comforts of his tenants in other ways too. After clearing out the crumbling tenements that used to occupy the spot, he hoisted his little world on abutments over First Avenue. There, he laid out grassy parks, a playground, a golf course, a swimming pool, even a hotel for the River City folk to enjoy at leisure. Strolling on the bridge that crosses the broad, uncertain vista of Forty-second Street, you feel you're in another town. A higher town than the people down below.

Still, the River Cityans have suffered indignities like the rest of us. About twenty years ago, the area was bought out by Wilhelm Sturgeon, the hotel magnate, the one who looks like a toad. He wanted more rent, and that meant more towers. So the swimming pool and the golf course are gone. The playground and the parks were almost lost, too, but the residents fought back. As of this minute, they seem to have Sturgeon at bay.

But then there's the little matter of Cooper House. It's a wide old limestone structure, seven stories high, with plenty of ornate designs and dragons and pilasters carved into the front. It fits in well with the general ambience of the little city. But it sits on the corner of Forty-first Street and Second Avenue. On the border of River City, that is. It's not part of River City itself.