The Hidden Man (15 page)

I opened my eyes and shook my head fiercely. My chest filled with emotion, heavy, suffocating. Love, for me, was always suffused with pain, with vulnerability, the accompanying fear of losing what you love even as you immerse yourself in it. But now they were dead, so there was no fear of loss, only the love that remained, now unadulterated, pure, overpowering.

I got out of the chair, turned off the light, and left her room. I stripped my clothes and got into bed. Sleep did not come immediately. I stared at the ceiling and thought about what Shauna had said. To some extent, she was right. I was merging two things, my guilt for time lost with my family because of work, and remorse for their loss, but letting the former overpower the latter, making myself to blame for their deaths.

Still, I couldn’t let go of one very clear fact: I was supposed to go with Talia and Emily downstate that weekend. I’d cleared it with the boss, with the client. We were nearing the end of the trial, the defense was about to rest its case, and I’d completed the witnesses I was assigned.
Go spend time with your family
, Paul had told me.
That’s a direct order
. But I had to be the hotshot. I’d caught a lead. I’d found Ernesto Ramirez, the ex-Latin Lord, who had information that could blow up the government’s case, who could pin the murder of the neighborhood businessman on a rival street gang, not the gang whom the government had tied to Senator Hector Almundo.
The government has the wrong street gang
, we would have told the jury.

It had been my decision, and mine alone, to stay back and follow up on this lead instead of spending the weekend downstate with my family. If I could tie the business owner’s murder to the Lords and not the Columbus Street Cannibals, the government’s premise for the case would be undermined. Devastated. Though Senator Hector Almundo was charged under a multiple-count indictment, the charges related to that murder had been the centerpiece of the case.

I chose being a hero over taking my wife to see her parents, over taking my baby to see her grandparents. I was supposed to be driving the car that night.

Somewhere in those thoughts, I drifted off. When I opened my eyes again, eyeing the clock, which read just after three in the morning, it wasn’t the sound of Emily’s cry that had stirred me. It was the telephone ringing at the side of my bed.

It was my brother, Pete.

“Jason,” he said breathlessly, “I’m in big trouble.”

19

T
HIS ONE HAS ALWAYS stayed with you: a family dinner, itself an unusual occurrence. The old man is usually away in the evening, plying his trade at poker games or bars, petty hustles that might pay the groceries next week if he doesn’t blow it on booze. Not tonight. A tension in the room, typical in his presence. Mom has brought the pot roast, potatoes, and carrots to the table in silence. The old man—Jack, you call him, but not to his face—is reading the paper and mumbling under his breath.

He doesn’t intimidate you, not anymore. That one thing, your ability to catch a piece of pigskin and break away from defenders, has given you immunity in the confines of your house. But the other two, Pete and your mother, are a different story. Pete is looking at Jack while he slowly eats, and you’re trying to figure out if it’s love or fear in his eyes, and you decide it’s both.

“How was practice?” your mom asks you.

“Fine,” I say. “I pulled a hamstring. I’ll have to sit out this week to be ready for Saturday.”

“So you’ll only score
two
touchdowns,” says Pete.

God, Pete looks just like Jack. It’s painful to make that connection. He is docile, like Mom, but with the face and build and maturing voice of our father.

“I was thinking about next year,” Pete says cautiously. Next year Pete will be a freshman at Bonaventure, while you’ll be off to whatever university whose scholarship you accept.

“What about next year, honey?” Mom asks.

“Next year,” you say, “there will be high school girls calling this house every night.”

Mom smiles and looks at Pete. “What about next year, Pete?”

Pete shrugs. “I was thinking, maybe—maybe I’d try out for the football team.”

“You?”
This from Jack, his eyes looking over the paper, one word followed by a disapproving grunt.

You?
A single word that deflates Pete, returns his focus to his plate of food, his face now ashen. You look at your mother, who is frozen, too, unwilling to cross the line that Jack has laid down.

“Yeah, prob’ly—prob’ly a dumb idea,” Pete mumbles.

“I think it’s a great idea,” you say, catching the eyes of your father. “I think you should give it a shot, Pete.” But you are talking to the old man as much as to your brother. You have locked eyes now, and you realize it now more than ever, that you want to get as far away from this house as possible.

I MADE IT to the police station within an hour of receiving Pete’s call. Never a happy place, the station house was particularly grim at four in the morning. A few family members, tired and disappointed and worried, awaited the release of their loved ones. Otherwise, the place was empty, the cheap tile floors showing the dirt, the air thick with sweat and body odor. I found the desk sergeant behind a plate of bulletproof glass and showed him my credentials, which he did not receive warmly.

They buzzed me in and a cop with sandy hair and deep-set eyes was waiting behind the door. “Denny DePrizio,” he said to me, not offering his hand but turning toward his desk, assuming I would follow. He actually took me past the desks to an interview room, where I took a seat across from him.

“Drugs and weapons,” he said to me. “Over a ticket of uncut rock and unregistered firearms.”

A kilo of rock cocaine and guns? “You got the wrong guy,” I said.

“He’s definitely wrong, I’ll give you that.”

“My brother’s a lot of things,” I continued. “He’s not much for the nine-to-five job. Sometimes he’s a shithead. But he doesn’t run guns and he doesn’t sell rock. C’mon, Detective. Take a look at the guy. He was scoring some powder, because he’s an idiot, and he wasn’t careful where he bought it. He was in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

He liked that, treated it like I was joking. “These guys come in all shapes and sizes, Counselor. Hell, we busted a grandmother a few weeks back, selling rock off her back porch. A grandmother.”

“I’m not saying walk him. I’m saying, simple possession.”

He laughed out loud. “Wasn’t how it looked to me,” he said. “Baby brother didn’t look like he was making a small purchase.”

“Bullshit.”

His smile wavered, then disappeared. “See, this is where you’d be trying my patience, Counselor. I see this kid selling a crate full of weapons, there’s a couple tickets of uncut rock as a nice throw-in, and now I got his brother telling me to skate him on a simple possession? You got some big-ass stones, my friend.”

I wasn’t getting anywhere with this guy, not that I’d expected to. I wasn’t even sure I’d convinced myself. As much I fought it, I couldn’t deny the possibility that Pete was guilty as hell, that he’d royally messed up.

I did the calculations in my mind, though I’d need to look up the sentencing statutes to be sure. With priors for simple possession, assuming here a possession with intent and gun charges, Pete could be looking at ten years inside.

“What you should be worried about,” DePrizio said, “is a federal transfer.”

That was worse. Federal prosecutors had a real hard-on for guns these days. A federal conviction would be a minimum of ten years, and federal time was hard time, not day-for-a-day like in state court; at least eighty-five percent of the sentence had to be served in a federal prison.

But this guy wasn’t raising the specter of a federal transfer just to pass the time.

“Unless,” I said.

The detective nodded at me. “Right, unless.”

Unless he cooperated, DePrizio meant. Traded up the chain. Was Pete part of a chain? Was he really selling cocaine? I couldn’t believe it, which is to say, I was literally incapable of putting together a set of facts that had my little brother selling drugs and running guns.

“Maybe we should talk about that,” I said.

“Maybe we should. But not tonight.” The detective checked his watch. “I’m on in four hours. I’m going home. You want to see your brother?”

To be continued. I didn’t know what kind of hand I had to play yet, anyway.

“Please,” I said. I followed a uniform down to the basement. I was buzzed past two sets of barred doors, and he directed me to the final cell, with cinder-block walls and metal benches bolted to the floor. There were over a dozen people inside. Most of them were black, and most of them looked like it wasn’t their first time in a cell. A guy in the corner, a white kid strung out and in the midst of obvious withdrawal, had recently thrown up, and the others were either heckling him or yelling at him to clean it up.

Pete was sitting on the floor, against the wall, his arms wrapped around his knees. He was keeping his eyes straight forward, an obvious attempt to avoid any confrontation. He was wound as tight as I’d ever seen him.

Jesus
, I thought. Pete couldn’t hold up for one week in a penitentiary.

When I stopped at the cell bars, some of the attention turned my way. I caught a couple of hoots and hollers. More than one of them was hoping, I gathered, that I was here for them, that their family had hired them a private attorney to handle their case.

“I gotta take a piss!” one of them said.

“Lawyer man, you comin’ to set me free?” another called out.

At that, Pete looked up and saw me. His eyes were blood-red, his hair matted, all standing in stark contrast to the lively blue shirt and khakis and polished loafers he was sporting.

“Motherfucker white boy gets the lawyer.”

Pete approached the bars tentatively. I raised a hand, to keep his voice down, to keep it cool while he was sharing a cell with anyone.

“Jason, I swear . . .”

I took his hand and gripped it. Tears welled up in his eyes, and I struggled not to return the favor. My little brother. I was supposed to protect you.

“We’ll figure this out,” I promised. I leaned against the bars, so that we were almost nose to nose. “Pete, listen to me. Don’t you say a word to anyone in here, okay? These guys trade on that sort of thing all the time. Don’t be telling your story to anyone, right?”

He closed his eyes, swallowed hard, and nodded.

I leaned in closer. “Who were you arrested with?”

Pete shook his head and answered in a whisper. “I was with two people,” he said. “I think one of them got away. The other guy, I don’t know him.”

“Is he here?” I whispered.

He shrugged his shoulders. “No.”

I looked behind Pete at the occupants again. Most of these guys were bigger than Pete, and all of them were meaner. Three guys in particular caught my attention, looked like Tenth Street muscle, but I’d have to see their bicep to know for sure. These guys were the ones to watch. They would be calling the shots. Two of them had their hair done up high and were calling after the junkie who had vomited, but the guy in the middle, the bald guy with arms that bulged out of his sweatshirt, eyed the others in the cell without comment. He was the leader.

“Okay,” I said gently. “One step at a time, Pete. We’ll figure this out. I will figure this out.” I gripped his hand as tight as I could, trying to shake him out of what looked, to me, like the first signs of my brother completely falling apart. “You stay tough tonight, and I’ll get you out of here within twenty-four hours. We can talk about your case then.”

He took a minute with that, squeezing my hand back. He wanted to hold on to my hand for the next twenty-four hours but knew that he couldn’t. “God, Jase, I’m sorry,” he whispered. “You gotta know, what happened here isn’t—”

“Later,” I said. “Later, Pete.”

I looked past him again to the guy I made for Tenth Street, the big bald guy. Most people eventually catch on when they’re being eyeballed, and soon enough he turned in my direction. I nodded to him. “You got a law yer?” I asked him.

He looked at me like I’d asked him if he was enjoying the surroundings. I removed a business card from my pocket and held it, with two fingers, through the bars.

He took a long time with that before speaking. “Ain’t gettin’ no lawyer.”

He wasn’t planning on a private attorney, he meant. “Have I got a deal for you,” I said.

I could see that this guy wanted to dismiss me, but he was interested. He decided to make me wait, but finally he got off the bench and approached me. He got within a few feet of the bars and looked down at my business card without taking it.

“What-choo sayin’ now?”

“You want a lawyer who gets paid by the same people who pay the prosecutor and the judge?” I asked. “Or do you want me?”

“I ain’t got it.”