Running from the Law (9 page)

He shook the fork at me. “You could visit more. It’s not the worst thing.”

I rubbed my eyes and began to wonder why I had come. Had I really thought he could help? I didn’t even eat sausage. “Now, getting back to general principles. Which general principle is it we’re talking about? There are so many, and you can never find the index.”

“You know which one, Miss Wiseguy.”

“No, I don’t. I didn’t take general principles in law school. Maybe it was an elective?”

LeVonne turned around in his seat, facing almost backward out the screen door to the tiny cement back of the store’s lot. I don’t know what he was looking at, there was nothing in the back except a cinderblock wall, two battered garbage cans, and a fig tree growing out of the concrete floor. Come to think of it, it was something to see.

“The principle, Miss, is that you don’t quit. I didn’t raise a quitter. That’s what I’m saying.”

“Why does it come down to what you raised? This has nothing to do with you. Whatever decision I make, it doesn’t reflect on you.”

“Of course it does. Everything I do, everything
you
do … what did you say? What was that word?”

“Reflects?”

“
Reflects
on each other. On all of us.” He made a circle in the air with the fork, and I figured we were talking the entire globe now, not just Korea. “It all
reflects
on us. Everything reflects on us. Our family name.”

“Our what?” The concept was so ludicrous I couldn’t repeat it. “We’re the Morrones, not the Kennedys. Not the Rockefellers.”

He slammed the fork down on the spoon rest. “Where did you get the idea that you have to have money to have a family name?”

His vehemence took me aback, and LeVonne shifted farther out the back door.

“Wherever you got it, it was wrong! We do have a family name—Morrone. It was my father’s name, and he came and started this shop in 1914. He was one of the first to come over, to come to the Market. My father, Vito Morrone, Senior. Your grandfather, you understand me?”

“Sure, but—”

“He had a name, and it counted as much as anybody else’s, and everybody respected it. He never disgraced it. When he couldn’t get hired at an inside job he started his own shop. He and my mother worked in it every day until they died. My father, he never gave up and never, ever
quit
. That’s what I’m doing here and that’s what LeVonne’s doing here,” he said, red in the face under his fresh shave.

“Dad, relax.”

“We’re all making our own name here. Nobody gave it to us, and we’re making it every day. So are you. You don’t disgrace it. You don’t
run away.
” He turned his back on me, picked up the fork, and jabbed it into the sausage. The meat spat in protest. Black smoke rose from the pan. Burned.

I felt a light touch on my arm.

LeVonne. His fingers were slim, his hand looked like a nimble spider against the white table. He shook his head, no.

“What?” I mouthed to him silently.

His almost-black gaze slid over to the left. I followed his eyes to the photographs on the wall, speared with steel tacks to a bulletin board of crumbling cork. I’d stopped noticing the pictures long ago: my father’s old mutt, me at Holy Communion, my grandfather and grandmother, with maybe three teeth between them. But I sensed which picture LeVonne meant, and it was none of those.

Her hair was a white-gold swirl behind her head, her wedding dress was a white-gold swirl at her feet. My father towered over her in the photo, he must have been standing on a stepladder. His jacket was a rented white, his hair two wings of pomade. He looked like a lovestruck young man who would never believe the lithe woman at his side would someday run away.

My father never spoke of her, and I’d stopped pressing him to. I didn’t know why she left until one of the Espositos told me, when I was ten, that it was Another Man. Before that, I thought it was because she was Canadian, since Jimmy DiNardo said it wouldn’t have happened if my father had married an Italian girl instead of a Canadian girl. My child’s mind assumed that Canada was an exotic country, which accounted for my mother’s singular looks and manners. Even her clothes were different; stiff linen dresses, orange capri pants, midriff tops that tied at the bellybutton. She was the talk of the Market, but I had not associated disgrace with what she did to my father until this very minute. He protected me from that, as he did from the fact that she died shortly after she left.

And it took LeVonne, who was stone silent, to explain my own father to me. I glanced back at LeVonne. His head was cocked as if he were listening. His dark eyes moved over my father’s back, seeming to scan his posture and stance for clues.

I watched my father, too, then. I listened as he snapped off the gas and reshuffled the sticky sausage. And after he had tended the sausage forever and I couldn’t stand wondering why he wouldn’t turn around, I made a silent promise to him, or more accurately, to his back. I wouldn’t quit the Hamilton representation, no matter what. There would be no running away. Not anymore.

After all, I had a family name to uphold.

Not Rockefeller. Not Kennedy. Morrone.

On general principles, no less.

When I got back to the office, my secretary, Janine, was sitting at my desk. Her black clogs were crossed on my mail and she was yapping away on my telephone. Janine Altman was a complete slacker except when a telephone receiver made contact with her triple-pierced ear. Then she’d twist her penny-red hair around a bitten-off fingernail and chatter away, animated as Ann-Margret on the telephone in
Bye-Bye Birdie
. I kept Janine on because I was raising her to be a responsible adult, which was why I reached over and rudely pressed down the telephone hook.

“What’s the story, morning glory?” I said to her. “What’s the tale, nightingale?”

Her purple-lipsticked mouth dropped open. “Rita?” she said, scrambling to sit up straight. “Why’d you do that?”

“Child, I’ve asked you not to make drug deals from my phone. Can’t you use your own?”

“It wasn’t a personal call?” she said with her characteristic inflection. Every statement she made sounded like a question. It drove me nuts.

“Janine, are you asking me something or telling me something?”

“Telling you something? I was talking to Judge Hamilton on the phone? He says to come quick?”

I felt my stomach leapfrog. “What?”

“He’s been arrested? He’s in jail?”

Christ. “Where?”

She consulted a yellow message slip. “At the police station in Radnor Township?” She thumbed through the other slips on the pad underneath. “Before that the
Inquirer
called and the
Daily News
? And Jim Hart, you know, that reporter from Channel 10? The one with the hair?”

“The press? Do they know about the arrest?”

She nodded. “Yes?”

Shit. “You told them all no comment, right?”

She looked guilt-stricken under her alternative makeup.

“What did you do, Janine?”

“Nothing?”

“Tell me you didn’t talk to the press.”

“Just Hart?” She cringed, as if awaiting the blow I was actually considering.

“What did you tell him?”

“My phone number?”

I took in some oxygen, but not much. “Janine, don’t talk to the reporters. Don’t date the reporters. Don’t feed the reporters. The shit is about to hit the fan,
capisce
?”

“But he’s so hot?”

Someday I would give up on her. “I’m sure,” I said, and threw a legal pad and a copy of the Pennsylvania Crimes Code into my briefcase.

“I’m sorry?”

“Do something secretarial for me. Call Mack and tell him to assign some young genius to my cases. And tell him I said ‘pay up.’”

“Okay?” She made a note in pen on the palm of her hand. Another thing I’d asked her not to do.

“Then cancel everybody today. And tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow, too?”

I snapped my briefcase closed and grabbed my bag. “And tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow. You ever hear that before? You know what that’s from?”

“Macbeth?”

I did a double-take. “Right.”

She grinned crookedly and held up her hand. On her palm it said, YOUNG GENIUS.

11

T
he route to Radnor Township Police Station winds through the most expensive wilderness west of Philadelphia and is dotted with stone mansions set so far from their mailboxes it could be another zip code. Residents call this costly forest “hunt country” and I believe they hunt foxes here, not Italians or other critters.

If I didn’t have a client arrested for murder, I might have enjoyed the drive, with the hand-stitched steering wheel sliding through my fingers and my car taking the curves like it was glued to the asphalt. Instead I was trying to remember the elements of the crime of murder as I whipped past the mailboxes, their tasteful white lettering echoing names on the SIGN HERE line of the Declaration of Independence.

Hancock, Morris, Lynch.

I tried to reach Kate on my car phone to tell her what was going on, but there was no answer, and no answering machine. Kate loathed them, lumping them with such abominations as VCRs, personal computers, and ballpoint pens.

Wolcott, Clark, Stone.

Kate would be tough enough to weather this, I’d seen her attack ivy like the Terminator. I guessed she wouldn’t be at the police station. Fiske protected her, by tradition and instinct, and she seemed content in this arrangement. I’d always thought their marriage had a comfy, natural-order feel to it, like a faithful pairing of loons. Shows you how much I know.

Adams, Ross, Smith.

I tried to reach Paul, too, but he wasn’t at his office or at home. I called on the car phone, but no luck. I tried not to think about where he was, what he was doing, or who he was doing it with. I had to bail his father out of jail. I punched the end button on the car phone again for no reason at all.

Wilson, Taylor, Chase.

I caught sight of the police station at the fringe of the woods behind a huge, well-maintained baseball field. I came to a full stop when I saw the commotion.

ABC, NBC, CBS.

The baseball field was empty of Little Leaguers, whose families had fled the steamy tarmac of their circular driveways for beach houses. Reporters had taken their place, alleged adults with cameras and microphones. White TV news vans with flashy logos were parked in the station lot, their silvery satellite dishes reflecting the midday sunshine. Even the playground was overrun by the media and their shiny toys.

I took a deep breath, gunned all six of my Teutonic cylinders, and drove down the road and into the parking lot. I ignored the camera flashes and videocameras that recorded my car’s excellent handling. I pulled into the first illegal space and the reporters were on me almost before I cut the ignition.

From a woman reporter with a dictaphone: “Miss Morrone, do you have any comment on the judge’s arrest?”

How about shit, piss, and fuck? “No comment.”

From a slick TV reporter: “People are saying the judge should step down from the bench. Will he?”

Are you kidding? “Why should he? Judge Hamilton is one of the best judges on the district court. We need him.”

From a Connie Chung knock-off: “How will this affect the lawsuit for sexual harassment?”

She’s dead, so it goes away. “I have no comment. Excuse me, I’d like to get through here without serious bodily injury. To you.”

From a black reporter: “Will Judge Hamilton plead guilty?”

Does the Pope shit in the woods? “Of course not.”

And a follow-up, shouted from the back of the crowd: “Is the judge guilty, Ms. Morrone?”

Your guess is as good as mine, bucko. “Absolutely not. My client is innocent of any and all charges against him.”

I wedged my way through the throng, ducked a thousand more questions, and stepped inside the station house. I’d never been in a police station, but I didn’t expect it to look like the home office of an insurance company. The walls glowed eggshell white and the matching tile floor was buffed to perfection. The baseboards were done in teal, as were the doorjambs and other molding. The hall was quiet, no one was anywhere in sight. I figured all the insurance agents were out harassing people like you and me.

“May I help you?” said a gray-haired receptionist, who looked up from the mystery novel she was reading. Her back was to a large window, and reporters pressed against it like chimps at the zoo.

“Yes. Can you make those reporters disappear?”

“Certainly.” She got up and dropped the Levolors in their faces. Mystery readers take no prisoners.

“I’m Rita—”

“I know, I saw you on TV. Have a seat in the waiting room. Lieutenant Dunstan is expecting you.”

The color scheme of off-white and teal prevailed in the waiting room, and group photos of the Radnor police in the 1900s hung on the walls, displayed like family portraits. In each one, tall white men stood in front of a woodsy backdrop, sporting handlebar mustaches and greatcoats.

“You must be Ms. Morrone,” said a deep voice. I stood up and shook the hand of Lieutenant Dunstan, a tall white man with a handlebar mustache. I avoided the double-take.

“Uh, yes.”

“Would you like some coffee? We can have Hankie here get you some.” He waved at the receptionist, who looked up expectantly.

“No, thank you. I’d just like to see my client, Judge Hamilton.”

“So you’re the one. I read about you,” he said, his tone convivial. His face was open and earnest, with large blue eyes and a smile that said,
The policeman is your friend.

“How is the judge?”

“He’s fine. Fine. He’s back in his cell.”

“You have him in a cell?”

“Where else would we put him?”

My inexperience, showing like a bra strap. “Is he in handcuffs?”

“No, we usually use the cell or the handcuffs, but not both. Belt and suspenders, don’t you think?”

I thought I heard Hankie sniggering, but it could have been my imagination. “Judge Hamilton is a federal district judge. He doesn’t need to be in a cell.”