The Intruder (36 page)

Tread lightly, she reminds herself. She takes a step toward him and the floorboard creaks under her boot.

“Well,” she says. “I actually need your help. My husband is involved in a criminal case and—”

“Fuck you.”

“Excuse me?”

“I said, Tuck you.’ You got that?” His green eyes glare through the dust. “You were supposed to help me.”

“I realize our treatment plan never quite got off the ground. . .”

“FUCK YOU TWICE!” he shouts. “You tried to have me put away.”

She sees the hammer in his hand is shaking. She takes another step, and this time the floorboard actually seems to bend a little.

“I understand you have reasons to be angry.”

“I have reasons?” He slaps the head of the hammer into his left palm. “Oh, thank you very much.”

She holds her head up. “I just wanted to see if you remembered anything that happened that night you saw my husband and those other men in the tunnels.”

“Jesus Christ, lady! I don’t want to remember! I just want to do my little job and take my medication. All right? Let’s make a deal. I’ll leave you alone and you leave me alone.”

If only he’d made that offer four months ago. He reaches under his grime-smeared sweatshirt and scratches himself.

“Why d’you wanna talk about this anyway?” he asks.

“My husband’s been charged with killing your friend.”

“Yeah, well, life’s full of tough breaks, isn’t it?” He turns back to the wall and starts banging on some white trim.

“Is that what happened?” she asks.

“Why do you wanna know?”

The look he gives her freezes the breath in her chest. She realizes she’s afraid to hear the answer.

“I want to know if you saw my husband kill that man.”

“What’s it worth to you?”

“What’s it worth?”

“Yeah, what would you pay me to say he didn’t kill Abraham?”

“Just tell me, goddamn it!”

Her voice sounds raw and unfamiliar to her.

“What’s the matter?” he asks. “He didn’t tell you?”

She starts to back off. She’s shown him too much of what’s churning inside her.

“It would be better to hear it from somebody else.”

The back of her head tightens. She takes another step back and a small piece of floorboard drops away.

“You must have some marriage.” John G. tosses the hammer from hand to hand.

It’s enough. He’s just playing with her. She starts fixing her scarf and buttoning up her overcoat. Trying to figure out what she’s going to do with the rest of her life. It was foolish to come here today. Jake is going to prison and her heart is going to break. Nothing can change that.

“I’m sorry to have disturbed you,” she says.

“ ‘C’mon Philip, gimme the bat’ ”

He’s looking down at that hole in the floor.

“What?”

“He said, ‘Give it up,’ and then he tried to get between Abraham and the other guy.”

“And this is my husband you’re talking about?” Don’t sound too eager, Dana cautions herself. Don’t put words in his mouth.

“Well, the guy I always see you with.”

“And you saw him say this and try to stop that other man from killing your friend?”

She has to resist the urge to run over and throw her arms around his neck.

“Yeah,” he sighs. “I guess you can tell the judge that’s what I saw.”

“But can you tell the judge that yourself?”

All of a sudden, the flow of their dialogue stops.

“You want me to go into a courtroom and testify?”

“Is there a problem with that?”

“You gotta be kidding.” He draws back as if he’d just touched a live wire.

“No, I need you to do that...”

“Okay, I think I’ve heard about enough. I’ve gotta work now. All right? So I’ll see you. Good luck and everything.”

He turns back to the wall and starts banging it with his sledgehammer.

“You have to tell the judge what you saw ...”

“You gotta go, you gotta go.” He keeps pounding without looking at her.

“Because otherwise my husband could go to jail...”

“Gotta go, gotta go.” His banging drowning out her rising anxious voice. “Can’t stay, can’t stay.”

“And that would be a tragic mistake ...”

“Can’t stay! Gotta go, gotta go!”

The wall is starting to come apart and he’s stuck on the same phrases like a needle on an old phonograph record. “Can’t stay! Gotta go!” And her nervousness is just making him talk faster and bang the wall harder. Has she pushed him too far? “Can’t stay! Gotta go!”

A huge chunk of wall falls away and light streams in from the next room.

“Mr. Gates, please calm down!” she half shrieks.

The echo of her voice hushes both of them for a moment. She hears tiny timbers crackling and snapping under her feet.

“Why can’t you just let me be?” he says. “You want me to help you, I can’t even help myself.” He wiggles one of his loose lower molars with his tongue.

“I just want you to say what happened.”

“Oh yeah, sure, right, that’ll be a breeze.” He sputters. “Talking to a bunch of lawyers and a judge.” He raises his hand. “ T stipulate the defendant has to stop taking drugs. I stipulate the defendant has to turn over his assets. I stipulate the defendant has to give up his freedom. I stipulate the defendant has to go back to a shelter.’ ”

“I understand if you’re reluctant.”

“Reluctant?” He almost starts laughing. “Lady, these people are going to rip my fucking head off.”

“My husband’s lawyer wouldn’t let them do that to you.”

“Oh yeah, right.” There’s not much bite left in his voice. “Look, I’m sorry, I just can’t handle any more pressure right now,” he says, rattling the pills in his pocket. “I wouldn’t be much of a witness anyway.”

“What makes you say that?”

“Because look at me. Who’s gonna believe me? I’m not a person anymore.”

She takes a moment to look him over. He’s certainly more
presentable than he was that first day he came into her office. His beard is shaved and his hair is shorter, though it’s thin and graying in places. Understandable for the life he’s been leading.

“I’m looking at you. You look great.”

Oh, the shame! Trying to manipulate a mental patient by flirting. He half smiles to accept the compliment and then shakes his head, rejecting it.

“Nah. You’re good,” he says. “But you’re not that good.”

“But I mean it.” She takes another step toward him. “You’re a hundred times better than the last time I saw you. Seriously. You’re working. The people at the shelter say you have your own room and you’re earning money. In a few months, they say, you might even be able to go out on your own.”

“But none of it counts.”

“Why not?”

“It just doesn’t. I’m faking it.”

“Faking what? You’re alive.”

“Yeah, I’m alive, but I’m one of those people who might as well be dead. You know? I had my chance to be happy,” he says. “I had Margo and I had Shar and I lost both of them. God doesn’t give you two more chances like that.”

“I just don’t know how you can be so certain about that.”

She senses that he wants to testify, he wants to do the right thing. But something’s holding him back.

“No, it’s no good.” He shakes his head convulsively, denying everything. “I’ve fallen too far. I’ve done too much bad shit. I’m not a person anymore. God won’t forgive me.”

“Forgive you for what?”

“You wouldn’t understand.”

Dana feels as if she’s trying to pry open a sleeping man’s eyelids. But how’s she going to do it? He could go either way.

She needs to give him a reason to help her out.

“Listen, can I tell you something?” She arches her neck and touches her throat with her fingers, trying to figure out how to begin.

“What?”

She flips through her mental files, trying to come up with
something that will have meaning for him. Don’t lose him. Don’t let him slip away. But she’s just a nice Catholic girl from Connecticut. What’s she going to tell a man who’s been living on the street, smoking crack, and eating out of garbage cans for so long?

She lunges at a memory, hoping it will jar him.

“You just made me think of this thing that happened when I started at the hospital,” she says quickly. “My supervisor suggested I go on a few runs with the ambulance crew.”

“Yeah? So?” John bangs the hammer against his left leg.

Keep going. Don’t lose him.

“So we went on a run to a fire in Chelsea and there was this one body that looked like part of the wreckage. You just looked at it and you felt sick. But then we realized it was still breathing. So the technician bent down and said, ‘Are you a man or a woman?’ Because it makes a difference in how they treat them. And this thing that didn’t have any eyelids anymore just looked up and said, ‘I’m a man. Can’t you tell? I’m still a man.’ ”

“So what’s that got to do with me?” asks John G., half curious but trying not to show it.

“That if he could still somehow hang on and say he was a man after what he’d been through, so could you.”

Pause. Did she get through to him?

“Easy for you to say.” He swings his hammer at a beam of light coming through the sooty window.

“Well, think about it.”

He puts the hammer down and faces her. All at once, Dana knows she’s reached him. Maybe he found something in the story or maybe he was just looking for an excuse to say yes. But then his eyes meet hers and for a second, she has the uncanny and uncomfortable feeling that he’s about to ask her for something she doesn’t want to give.

She starts to panic, wondering how far she’ll have to go to save her family. But then he drops his eyes and looks away, like the shy boy who used to stare at her in geometry class.

“Yeah, I’ll think about it,” he says. “Maybe you ought to tell me what day they want me in court. Just in case.”

“Thank you.” She reaches out and touches his hand.

He quivers a little and there’s a loud crash from downstairs as if part of the building’s foundations have just collapsed.

“By the way.” John G. turns back to finish off the wall. “Did that guy in the fire live?”

Dana hesitates only for a moment before she decides to tell him the truth. “No,” she says. “He didn’t.”

72

I said, what the hell are you doing here?” Philip looks around the Alpha Bar.

“Just asking some questions.”

Jake glances over his shoulder. The two old men who’d been sitting in the corner are gone. The scotch left in one of their glasses undulates slightly.

“Why don’t you leave decent people alone and mind your own business?” Philip’s face tightens like a fist.

“I have a court case I’m working on,” Jake says evenly. “I have some information I’d like to get from Miss Perrara.”

“And she doesn’t want to talk to you.”

“I didn’t hear her say that.”

“You hear me saying it, don’t you?” Philip raises his right hand as if he’s about to give Jake a slap.

The charms on Perrara’s necklace make that tinkling sound again. Jake looks over at her and suddenly things start to seem more involved. Philip isn’t just talking. He broke six bones in this poor woman’s face. He crushed a man’s skull with a baseball bat. He forced a crowbar up another man’s anus. This is a human being who gets something out of hurting other people.

“If you got a problem with me, you keep it that way,” Philip says, leaning over the bar and pointing a finger at Jake. “Don’t go bringing other people into it. Or else the people you’re close to might get brought into it.”

“You threatening my family, Philip?”

“It’s not a threat. It’s a prediction. Shit happens.”

Smart. Stopping just short of an actual threat.

“I still think Miss Perrara can make up her own mind whether she wants to talk to me.” Jake puts his business card down on the bar counter.

Instead of looking at it, though, Isabel Perrara turns to Philip and puts an arm around him. The torturer and the tortured. What do you expect? She owes him her job.

Philip smiles and fingers the charms on her necklace. “So now you got your answer,” he says.

73

I really don’t understand this case,” says Judge Henry Frankenthaler, looking from Jake and his lawyers to the two young prosecutors. “I mean, what do we have here? One nut testifying against another.”

They’re sitting in his chambers during a break from another tedious buy-and-bust case a week before Jake’s trial is supposed to begin. There’s a spectacular color photo spread of the Brooklyn Bridge hanging above Frankenthaler’s grayish Brylcreemed head, which used to be covered with unkempt curly brown defense lawyer’s hair.

Just to his left is a black-and-white picture of Henry in a tux, a swarthy bear laughing and shaking hands with the governor and the county chairman who helped him get nominated for the bench. In the background, there’s an orchestra and women in long dresses on the dance floor, looking impatient. A networking dinner. A schmoozefest. The pretext was probably a wedding or a bar mitzvah, but the real event was going on at some side table or banquette, where favors were being traded, posteriors were being kissed, and careers were being made and broken. This was the type of meal that could change your life; a move-’em-in, move-’em-out defense lawyer like Henry could rise to the office of distinguished jurist over hors d’oeuvres. The kind of event, in other words, where Jake will no longer be welcome once this case is done.

He’s already tried to get Susan to put it on the record that Philip threatened him in Little Italy the other day, but the prosecutors shot it down, saying that he’d come to the bar to question the witness and no direct intimidation was involved.

“I mean, we’re just talking here, right?” says the judge, looking at Francis X. O’Connell and Joan Fusco, the two AD As.

“Of course,” says Francis, ever eager to please a man in a black robe.

“I don’t understand why the DA even brought this case,” says Frankenthaler. “You have the word of two accomplices, this Cardi and his cousin, and then you got this character Taylor who’s been in and out of jail all his life and is currently living in a railway tunnel. It’s cockamamy. That’s the only word I can think of.”