The Intruder (33 page)

“That’s gratitude,” says Dana, pulling on her fingers and trying to hide her impatience.

Ms. Greenglass sighs as if she’s just noticed the bitterness in her own voice. “You know what I realize now? They’re all like that. All men. Even the ones who seem decent. They expect to be taken care of like children and then they give you nothing in return. They don’t even know how to give. My ex-husband was the same way. Twenty-two years of marriage, he never once cooked a meal or changed a diaper. Not once! Every night he fell asleep in front of the television. Never once asked me to go on a vacation where I wanted to go.”

She clucks her tongue and waves her hand as if none of it mattered. Her eyes are still angry, though.

“Don’t you find that?” she says to Dana.

“What?”

“That they’re all selfish children.”

“Well.” Dana puts her fingers to her lips, still looking for her opening. “I actually do get along with my husband and my son.”

“You know, the men at the center here are the same way.” Ms. Greenglass charges ahead, as if Dana hadn’t said anything. “They use our beds, take the medication we provide, watch television, and then they just leave when a better program comes along. So you know what I say when people complain I make too much for someone working at a nonprofit?” She curls her upper lip and affects a road-show-company Mame voice. “Tough luck, baby. I got mine, go get yours.”

If Ms. Greenglass were her patient, Dana would describe her as someone setting herself up for disappointment so she can feel vengeful and righteous later. But this isn’t therapy. It’s an attempt to locate a witness who can help her husband’s case.

“I’m sure you have very valid reasons for feeling the way you do,” she says.

That’s right. Give her some space. Make her feel comfortable talking to you. Develop a bond of trust.

Ms. Greenglass leans back in her chair, so her curly head is framed by the green Christmas wreath hanging from the crisscrossed bars over her window.

A tall black man with a mop in his hands and a scar across his bald head appears in her doorway.

“What do you want, Flamort?” asks Ms. Greenglass.

“Bennett went out awhile to get some lunch. He said he’d call you later.”

Ms. Greenglass draws back her lips and her nose seems to get sharper. “Goddamn it, who told him he could do that without my permission?!”

“I’m just passing the message,” says the man with the scarred head.

“You tell him I want to see him when he gets back. This isn’t any game. I’m the executive director here.” Her eyes flick up at the man. “And do my office before you do his. The floor is filthy.”

Actually, Dana notices, the floor is immaculate. The man bows his head and backs out of the office.

“I know they resent me here,” Ms. Greenglass tells Dana with barely contained fury. “I know the staff and the consumers talk about me when I’m not around here. But I don’t care. Really I don’t. My ego isn’t so fragile that I depend on their good opinion.”

Dana lowers her eyes, sensing it’s time to get on with her agenda here. “I came by today because I was trying to locate a particular client of yours.”

“Consumer.”

“Yes, consumer.” Dana tries to smile agreeably. “I was looking for a John Gates. I believe he was staying here. Is he still around?”

Ms. Greenglass’s eyes turn hard and distant. “What’s your interest?”

“I’d been seeing him on an outpatient basis. And you called our hospital looking for his file awhile back.”

Ms. Greenglass cocks her head to one side, like a cheetah catching
the scent of gazelle in the wind. “Are you trying to steal this consumer away from us?”

“No.”

“Then what do you want with him?”

Dana feels as if she’s six years old again, caught in her mother’s bathroom playing with the lipstick and rouge. To lie at this point would be dangerous to her professional life.

“We may need him as a witness in a criminal case my husband is involved in.”

“I see. And you want me to violate our rules of confidentiality to help you?”

“I just thought we could share some information as a matter of professional courtesy,” Dana says gamely.

Ms. Greenglass takes a moment to assess the situation, trying to figure the best way to position herself as the outraged victim.

“Don’t you think what you’re asking me is terribly inappropriate?” she says.

“I didn’t think it was that big a deal. He’s someone I’d seen at the hospital. If he doesn’t want to talk to me, he doesn’t have to. All I’m asking for is an address for him.”

But Ms. Greenglass isn’t interested in these finer points. She’s seized the moral high ground and she’s defending it with the fervor of a Masai warrior.

“Are you trying to get me in trouble?”

“No.”

“Is that what you’re trying to do? Are you trying to get our funding cut off? Because if you are, you can forget about it. I worked too hard to get where I am.”

“Please. I think you’re being a little paranoid.”

“Paranoid? You’re calling me paranoid?”

“No. I...”

“Listen, Miss whatever-your-name-is. I’m the only thing between these men and the street. I’m not going to let you march in here and expose them irresponsibly.”

Dana resists the temptation to remind her that not a minute before she was calling these men selfish children.

“No, no, no.” Ms. Greenglass half rises from behind her desk. “I am not going to allow my staff to cooperate with you.”

In spite of her better judgment, Dana finds herself getting pissed off. It isn’t just this last outburst. It’s having had to sit through this whole self-pitying, self-justifying monologue without getting anything in return.

“I’m sorry you can’t find it in your heart to help us,” she says in the coolest voice she can muster.

“What hospital did you say you were affiliated with anyway?” asks Ms. Greenglass, reaching for a telephone. “I’m thinking someone should talk to your supervisor.”

“Be my guest.” Dana gets up and drops her card on the edge of Ms. Greenglass’s desk. “If you’re going to help me, help me. If you’re not, don’t. I don’t see any reason for me to sit here and listen to this. I care, but not that much.”

It’s only when she’s halfway out the door that she realizes she’s just used one of Jake’s lines.

She turns left and heads down a long hallway where the tall black man with the scarred bald head is mopping the floor. She steps carefully to the side he hasn’t mopped yet.

“You looking for John G.?” he says, as she starts to pass.

“Yes, that’s right.”

He must have heard every word of the conversation while he was mopping outside the door.

“I think he went to one of them work shelters in Brooklyn,” he says. “One of their outreach workers came by and talked to him a few weeks back. I think John G. went over to their program.”

“You don’t remember which one, do you?”

“Nah.” The guy touches the scar on his head. “I’m no good with names now.”

She wants to clasp his hand in gratitude, but when she looks in his eyes she just sees bottomless wells of rage and numbness. With the scar across his head and his flat voice, she wonders if he was the victim of either a savage attack or a seriously botched lobotomy.

“I appreciate your talking to me,” she says slowly.

He looks down, comtemplating the soapy water in his bucket. “I appreciate a clean floor.”

64

Philip is standing on the balcony above the Rockefeller Center skating rink on a frigid Thursday afternoon, waiting for his cousin Ronnie.

There’s a slim young guy dressed in black performing in the middle of the ice. He leaps and turns, doing spins and double axels, and for some reason Philip can’t stop looking at him. He finds himself imagining what it would be like to skate along behind the guy, mirroring his movements, putting his hands on the guy’s slender hips.

Ronnie walks up. “Yo, my man Philip C. is in the house. Word up, blood. What it is.”

The kid’s appearance is jarring. In the week and a half since Philip last saw him, Ronnie has immersed himself even more deeply in black street culture. He’s got Bob Marley smoking a spliff on his T-shirt, a black Triple F.A.T. goose-down coat over it, baggy jeans, a pair of Air Jordan sneakers, and a red-and-white striped stocking cap just like the one the Cat in the Hat wears. No wonder Carmine’s worried about him.

Ronnie twists his right arm around like a pretzel, offering his cousin the latest uptown handshake.

Philip just stands there, looking at him.

“What are you calling me for?” he says. “You know we’re supposed to stay clear of each other until the trial begins.”

Ms. Fusco’s concern. Even though they’re cousins, she doesn’t want it to look like her witnesses are hanging around together all the time, cooking up a story for the prosecution.

“I just wanted to give you some four-one-one,” says Ronnie.

“Somewhat?”

“Some information, bro.” He makes his right hand into a gun and points it at his crotch, like a rap star. “Tony called from the auto body shop on Eighty-sixth yesterday. He said some nigger came by asking about us.”

Through his gloves, Philip feels the cold pulling back the skin under his fingernails. “Yeah, what’d he want to know?”

“I’m not sure. Tony thought he might’ve been working for a lawyer or something. Like an investigator.”

Philip turns away and leans over the brass railing. The young man skating below starts doing leaps and vaults, like he’s performing just for Philip.

“So, like, what should we do?” asks Ronnie.

“What should we do?” Philip looks back at his cousin, with his eyebrows frozen. “We should cross the fuckin’ borough to avoid this guy. He probably works for Jake Schiff.”

“Yeah, you think so?”

“He ask any questions about me being in prison?”

“No, why?”

“I just don’t like people asking about what went on there. It was private.”

The skater below does a triple spin and his blades shave the ice. Across the rink, men in dark blue uniforms are starting to erect the enormous Christmas tree.

“So I don’t get it.” Ronnie’s chin lolls idly at the bottom of his face. “The lawyer’s the one on trial here. Why’s he got an investigator asking about us?”

“He’s looking for dirt, that’s why.
CapiscefHe’s
trying to put us on the spot, so we do the prison time instead of him.”

“But—”

“Ronnie, look. Don’t think. Just do like I say. All right?”

He quietly simmers in the snow. Why does he have to keep worrying about this? He’s already made his deal with the prosecutors.
Now he has to concern himself with what the defense might dig up about his past. It’s not anyone’s damn business.

“But what do you want me to do?” Ronnie does a nervous side-to-side hip-hop shuffle. “You want we should pop this nigger with a bat next time he shows up?”

“No.”

Philip tries to calm himself by watching the skater. It’s the craziest thing; he keeps picturing himself skating hand in hand with the guy. It’s not a fag thing, he tells himself. It’s a display of manly athletic grace, the two of them together.

“You just keep track of this yom,” he tells his cousin. “And let me know if you hear about him asking any more questions. I’ll take care of the rest of it.”

65

So how’s the case going?” asks Bob Berger, slurping down his miso soup.

“Okay, considering,” says Jake.

They’re sitting near the back of an upscale Japanese restaurant on East Sixty-third Street. Though it’s after two o’clock, the place is crowded with businessmen and -women speaking softly with their heads inclined. The walls are covered with gray flannel to cut down on background noise, and the only soundtrack on the expensive Bose speakers is a solitary koto being plucked. This is a place where deals are made, not just talked about.

“Actually, it’s going rather badly.” Jake pushes his own soup away. “The judge has decided to allow in all the fingerprint evidence; most of the good people of Bensonhurst won’t talk to my investigator; and meanwhile, with only two and a half weeks until the trial begins, we can’t locate the one witness who might be able to help us. We’re looking for him night and day, but he keeps moving around. I don’t suppose you have a lot of contacts in the homeless community.”

“The only bums I know personally are the kind that summer in the Hamptons.”

There’s no mirth in Bob’s deep-set gray eyes. He clears his throat with a loud phlegmy rumble. Hrrmmm.

“How you fixed for cash?” he asks Jake as he wipes his mouth with a pink napkin.

Jake holds up his empty water glass at a passing waitress. “We’re not going to the Riviera anytime soon.”

He stops and tries to read Bob’s expression again. But there’s still nothing there. No crinkling around the eyes or tightening of the mouth. Just that hrrmmm phlegmy rumble from the back of his throat.

“So that’s why I was a little concerned that you haven’t sent over the Poverman contracts yet,” Jake says.

“My regular girl, Ingrid, is out. This new one, Felicia, doesn’t know her ass from her elbow. ...”

“Bob.” Jake puts the glass down. “Is there a problem?”

Bob clears his throat once more. God, it sounds like he has a carburetor in his larynx.

“Jakey,” he says, slowly sitting up. “You know, Chet Allan and I go back a long time.”

Jake hears a high-pitched bell sound ringing in his ear.

“No, I didn’t know that.”

Bob hocks into his handkerchief and folds it up. “Well, it was before your time,” he says. “Chet helped me with some exigencies a few years back.”

“Exigencies? I’ve never heard you use a word that long before.”

“It means you do today what gets you to tomorrow.”

“Actually it means situations requiring immediate attention.”

“Whatever. Chet did me a favor with the attorney general’s office when they were looking into some code violations I had up in East Tremont. Serious business, you know. They had a couple of fires and an old lady died when the roof fell in on her. Christ, it was awful. Newspapers calling, some
schvartze
assemblyman from up there yelling for my head. Anyway, Chetty made it all go away. So you can see how I’d owe him.”