Rough Justice (12 page)

“Mark Herd, his name is,” she said. She had a thin voice with a hard edge to it. There was nothing soft in the sound at all. “Six months ago, he was on the street, selling his body. To buy food and a roof—and drugs, too. I don't suppose you and I can imagine how degrading that feels, how inhuman. To be reduced to that.”

He ought to try newspaper work, I started to say. But, seeing her, I swallowed the words—and a drop of blood with them.

“He was raped twice,” Celia Cooper went on quietly. “Stabbed once. He's tested positive for the virus that causes AIDS.” She turned, lifted her eyes to me. “He's seventeen years old. You'll probably outlive him.”

“I wouldn't count on it.”

She frowned at me, but her voice stayed level. “Last January, Thad Reich saw him on the street and offered to buy him a sandwich and a cup of coffee. It was Mark's job to go with men, so he did. They sat in a diner together at a table. They ate. They talked. Thad didn't preach. Thad never preached. He just talked about himself, about his life. He had come to New York to work on Wall Street, did you know that?”

“Yes.”

“He talked about that to Mark. How it had hurt him, led him to drugs.” She smiled fondly with one corner of her mouth. Shook her head. “He talked about the pressures of Wall Street to a common hustler. He felt there was a connection.” She shrugged. “Apparently there was. Mark came to stay with us and he's been here ever since.” We both turned to look at the kid moving the squeegee dreamily over the pane. “I suppose,” said Celia Cooper, “Mark was in love with Thad. But, like I say, we all were, in one way or another. And what I'm having a very hard time dealing with right now is the fact …” She choked on it a little. When she faced me, I saw her eyes had gone damp. They were no less firm and direct, for all that. Just damp. “I'm having a hard time with the fact that you're here to find an excuse for killing him.”

Across the room a baby let out a cry. I turned to see him lift up his arms to his mother, wriggling on her lap. Behind me, Celia Cooper said:

“I just told you a story about how Thad Reich saved a young man's life. And all you heard me say was that Thad used drugs. Isn't that true?”

I snorted. She was good, all right. It was true. When she'd mentioned that, I'd felt a small surge of hope that maybe the man I killed wasn't some kind of visiting angel. I met the hard gaze of those wise and harried eyes.

“I'm not looking for an excuse,” I said, “just a reason. Thad Reich broke into my apartment and tried to strangle me.”

“I don't believe that. And I don't think a jury will either.”

“They won't. Unless I can find some sort of explanation.”

“Some sort of dirt on the man you murdered, you mean.” The harshness of the words surprised me. For a second, I saw the depth of her rage. I saw her tremble with it. Saw just how much of her formidable strength she was using to fight it back. In another moment, she brought herself under control. “I'm sorry. Maybe that wasn't fair. All right.” She took a breath. Went on in her brittle tone. “Thad used drugs. When he came here.”

“A year ago?”

“Or so. He had come to River City to look at an apartment. For him and his wife.” Now, as she spoke, she gazed off into one corner. A group of young women had gathered there. They were sitting on the tatty furniture, talking quietly sometimes, sometimes just staring, exhausted. Celia Cooper looked at them, but I don't think she saw them. Her expression had gone vague, a little wistful. “Thad hadn't been in New York very long. Only about a year, I think. But he was already making very good money—and he was already coming apart at the seams. He was taking cocaine, not enough yet to ruin him, but it had its hooks into him and he knew it.” She huffed softly, a wry laugh. “Well, he looked at the apartment and started down the hill. And he came by here. We were having a drug-counseling session just then. It's part of our program. There was a sign outside advertising it. He stopped—and he dropped in.” Again, there was that fond smile, the damp eyes. “I just remember that hopeful, eager, well-to-do, bright white face—like a great big moon—in the middle of all that dark and poverty-beaten homelessness. Obviously, I noticed him, and after the meeting I asked him into my office. We talked and—I guess he'd just been waiting to pour his heart out to somebody. He told me about how his life was … out of control, I think were the words he used. How he needed something, some meaning in his life. A month later, he was working here.”

“And off drugs.”

“Yes. He never used them again from that moment. I would have known.”

I nodded. I believed her.

“I'm not sure how much of this you know already,” she said.

“None.”

“So you say. And I do want you to know it. I want you to understand what sort of man you … Thad was. For instance, I should tell you that his hiring was controversial, at first. Normally, aside from our professionals, we hire our clients. Like Laurie, whom you met in the hall. Or Mark. All administrative work, handiwork, cooking, security—it's done by people who came here at first for shelter. Workers are given meals and permanent beds and a small salary. There aren't many jobs and—well, you can imagine—they're coveted. A way off the streets, a place to live. There was some murmuring when I hired Thad—the rich boy, the outsider—but it ended within, I'd say, two weeks of his coming on. The way he treated people, the way he extended himself. You simply could not dislike him for long. He was just … irresistible.”

She said it almost defiantly. I let out a long breath, put a cigarette in my mouth, lit it. I looked through the flame and saw Mark Herd, across the room, washing the same window again and again. Celia Cooper looked at me with something like sympathy.

“Is there anything else I can tell you, Mr. Wells?”

“I don't know.”

“I've told you everything I've told the police, and more than I told the media. I did it because I am so angry at you I don't know what is right, what is just. And that matters to me. I want to be sure you've had every chance to … find your excuse, your reason, whatever. I don't expect to be quoted in print. And if you do write anything against Thad—I mean, if you try him in the press to keep from being tried in the courts yourself—well, you will hear from me, and so will the public.”

I only had to look in her eyes to know it was true.

“Now I'll show you out,” she said.

And then something happened. Just a little thing, but I noticed it.

Celia Cooper had pointed her hand to the door. She was about to go on ahead of me. Before she did, she glanced back at Herd and called to him: “Oh, Mark. When you're done with that, would you please go downstairs and rebag the compactor. It's past time.”

He nodded, glancing back at us—sparing a special look for me. I caught it and returned it and, when I did, I saw the man in the battered hat move.

He was the guy in the armchair, the one who had been stealing some sleep. He shifted. Lifted his hand. Tilted back his hat. He was a bullet-headed black man with a mottled scar on one cheek, a flat brutal nose, and dark eyes. Just then, those eyes were trained on Herd and filled with murderous hatred. His mouth twisted once, quickly. Then, slowly, he lowered the hat, folded his hands on his belly, pretended to sleep again.

I hesitated. I knew him. I'd seen him before, but I couldn't remember where.

Then Celia Cooper walked out of the room. I turned and followed her.

“I guess I haven't been much help to you,” she said. We were standing at the door now. The building's sculpted facade vaulted, dark, into the gray above me.

“No,” I said. “You haven't.”

Then she was gazing at me again. She seemed to be leaning toward me. Her thin, hard voice came at me with sudden urgency. “I don't think anyone can help you,” she said. “I think you know that. I think you know in your heart that you've done a terrible thing. And that nothing will help you but to pay the price.”

She lifted her chin, certain.

I turned away from her.

12

I wanted a drink, more than anything. To kill the nausea, to stop the throbbing in my brain. And to stop the voice that now began to whisper again:

A man is dead. You killed him. Someone has to pay
.

It was Watts's voice. And Bush's. And Celia Cooper's. But it was my voice, too, and it kept going on.

You know in your heart you've done a terrible thing and that nothing will help you but to pay the price
.

It was true. I did know it. I knew it in my heart. I knew it on the surface of my knuckles where I still could feel the soft cartilage of Thad Reich's windpipe breaking. I knew it behind my eyes where I still could see him dying. I knew it in the black weight that sat at the center of me.

I knew it—and it was wrong.

There was a bar right down at the corner of Second. I paused in front of it after I came out of Cooper House. I looked in the window, saw my reflection there. What the hell, I thought. I don't have to go to work, anyway. I don't have to do anything. I can sit and drink until the voices stop, until the images fade, until the heaviness inside gets lighter. And until Watts gets what he needs for an indictment.

I looked away. The rain had stopped, but now the mist was blowing thick across the avenue, erasing the view to the south. I hailed a cab, got in.

“Downtown,” I said.

We drove off into the mist.

Lansing had given me Thad Reich's address. I didn't know if his wife would be there, but I didn't want to call ahead to find out. I sat back in the cab, stared out the window at the passing scene, the vague, gray blur of buildings. I did not think.

The cab let me off at an apartment near Astor Place. A hunkering old monster of a building. Brown-stone with medallions carved above the windows, caryatids holding up the cornice. The glass doors of its entrance were flanked by two huge columns chiseled with snaking reliefs.

Inside, in a broad lobby of inlaid marble, a door-man asked my name.

“John Wells,” I said.

“Not the John Wells in the paper.”

“No. Another John Wells. The one who's here to see Kathy Reich.”

He called up and announced me. He held the phone to his ear and waited for a response. He waited a long time. I stood in front of him and watched him wait. Finally, he said, “Hello?” Then, after a pause, “No. He says it's another John Wells.” I looked at the mural of clouds on the high ceiling. “Okay,” said the doorman, “up he comes.”

Up I went. To the seventh floor. A long, curving hall. Her door at the end …

It snapped open before I reached it.

“Great,” she said. “Just great.”

She stood in the entrance, one hand on her hip, the other holding the door. Her flat, sturdy frame was sleekly decked: a violet skirt, a purple sweater, a string of pearls. Her face was arch, her black hair pulled back severely. She watched me come from under dark eyebrows plucked to a V. Her jaws worked quickly at a stick of gum.

“So,” she said. “I guess you heard I was free.”

I came close enough to smell her perfume, then stopped. She kept talking:

“Kill my husband then ask for a date. I like that. It's so Richard III.” She looked me over, nodding. “That's a king. From a play. By Shakespeare. Christ. Thad was murdered by a man who doesn't know who Shakespeare is. He'd roll over.”

She spun away as I stood there, and went back into the apartment, leaving the door ajar. I took the last few steps and pushed into the place.

It was a large space. Sanded floors, standing lamps, brewer chairs. African art on the wall, a mask, a tapestry, a wreath of reeds. High, arching windows, gray with the sky. When I came in, Kathy Reich was at a low glass coffee table. She was jerking a cigarette from a pack there. She torched it furiously.

“Mrs. Reich …” I said.

“Mm …” She waved her match out, dropped it in an ashtray, blew smoke at me with her arm crossed under her breast. “Ms. Morris to you. Anyone who murders my husband uses my formal name. It's a rule of etiquette with me.” She stopped mashing her gum long enough to bring her cigarette to her lips again.

“Mind if I smoke, too?”

“Hell, no. I hope you smoke a lot.”

“Ms. Morris …” I took out a cigarette, lit it. “I didn't murder your husband.”

“Boy, is he gonna he pissed when we dig him up.”

“He attacked me.”

“Now, that's an interesting thing.” She pointed at me with her cigarette hand. “I heard you were saying that, and it's very interesting. My husband, Thad Reich, attacked you. Right?”

I pulled my collar down to show her the mark. “He tried to strangle me.”

“Tried to strangle you. Right. One time, just after we got to this city, Thad and I were walking hand in hand down Fifth Avenue when a drunk came by us in the opposite direction, reached out, and squeezed my left tit. Here. Hard. Okay?” She held her hand over her breast to show me. “I said, ‘Ow!' and Thad said, ‘Oh, gee, that must have hurt. Are you all right?' I mean, I don't expect him to get himself killed, but he can shake his fist at the guy's back, for Christ's sake.” She snapped her gum, puffed her cigarette, shook her head at me. “My husband tried to strangle you. Good. Was this before or after Tinkerbell kicked your ass?”