Where Nobody Dies (24 page)

I asked an unoriginal question. “Is that a threat?”

“Of course not,” came the breezy reply. But the gloved hand holding the imaginary balls gave a convulsive squeeze. “It's just a friendly warning. In fact,” he went on, spreading both his hands, “it could be considered as a choice. On the one hand”—he lifted his right palm—“the right decision could lead to an increased cash flow, permitting early payment of that mortgage of yours. On the other hand”—the left palm rose and clenched as he talked—“you could make a decision that could put you in a wringer. That could leave you out in the cold financially, and in other ways. It's totally up to you, Ms. Jameson. The ball's in your court.”

“Are you offering me money?” I asked.

“Up to a reasonable amount,” he agreed. “I'm sure we can come to terms.”

“Maybe not,” I said lightly. “We seem to have company.”

As the plainclothes policemen advanced out of the shadows, Lessek took a last desperate chance. Flinging me to the ground, he began to run. He got about six feet before he was stopped.

Strong arms grabbed me from behind and propped me up. “You okay?” The voice in my ear was Button's. I opened my eyes to the welcome sight of two uniformed cops. One held Lessek's gun, initialing and bagging it for use as evidence. The other snapped handcuffs onto a snarling Lessek. They gave an extraordinarily satisfying click as he was led away.

“You were right,” Button said, a broad smile lighting his face, “the DA's gonna love this. It's just what he needs to put the finishing touches on the Bellfield indictment.”

“Glad I could help,” I said dryly. Sweat poured down my face, in imminent danger of turning to icicles from the cold. “Now do you suppose we could adjourn to the precinct and get this wire off me? The tape,” I confessed in a voice I couldn't stop from shaking, “itches like hell!”

19

Look at the co-offin

With golden ha-andles

Isn't it grand boys
,

To be bloody well dead?

The Clancy Brothers, singing from the jukebox, had plenty of help on that one. They always did. The crowd at the Donegal Bay loved the idea of being the center of attraction, the laid-out star of the wake, surrounded by flowers and boozy, grieving loved ones.

I was an outsider, a Scotch-drinking Protestant. Matt Riordan, on the other hand, was home, lifting his glass of Irish and his fine tenor in a display of comradeship that was all the more impressive for being wholly genuine. He was Matty the Lawyer here, among the cops and bus drivers and civil servants, and yet his three-piece suits and educated diction didn't set him apart. They merely served to fix his identity, his role in the closely knit Inwood Irish community. They knew—and he'd proved it more than once—that his high-priced legal talents were theirs for free should young Kevin the rookie cop mistake an unarmed kid for a dangerous robbery suspect or should someone's wayward Mary Margaret get caught selling pot at the Sacred Heart dance.

It was getting late. Eyes were getting bleary, and whiskey-red noses were getting redder. But Matt Riordan was just beginning to relax. The tension lines in his face were smoothing out, the famous Riordan smile was broader, the voice richer and deeper without the strident edge of nerves. We both had something to celebrate; he'd won an acquittal and I was still alive.

Let's not have a sniffle
,

Let's have a bloody good cry
,

And always remember the longer you live
,

The sooner you'll bloody die
.

The song ended, as usual, with a rousing cheer. Riordan raised his glass to the red-haired barmaid, who nodded and smiled. I was about to protest that one more would be one too many, then decided that one too many was just what I needed.

I was in that heady state of euphoria plus exhaustion in which everything I'd done seemed to have happened to someone else. Surely it couldn't have been
me
, I now protested, who'd strapped on the Kel set recorder at the Eighty-fourth Precinct and proceeded to trap Todd Lessek into spilling his guts on tape? I, Cass Jameson, hadn't really played Cagney and Lacey up there on the Brooklyn Bridge, looking into the barrel of a snub-nosed revolver, had I? Then I recalled the world-turned-upside-down feeling of being thrown to the ground. I'd skinned my knees on the bridge walkway. Button, back at the Eight-four, had insisted on mercurochrome. My knees, tingling under my wool skirt, looked like they had in my tomboy childhood.

“I can't believe I did all that,” I said, shaking my head. “I can't believe I let Button talk me into it.”

Matt shrugged noncommittally, but there was a gleam in his blue eyes. “It's what Nancy would have done,” he remarked.

I fell for it. “Who's Nancy?” I asked, then laughed in spite of myself. “Is this another Nancy Drew joke?”

Riordan grinned. He'd once warned me against “playing Nancy Drew,” and my reaction of mortal insult had amused him no end. He seldom lost an opportunity to kid me about it.

“And now Nancy has successfully solved another case,” he said, his mouth full of bar peanuts. “What's this one called,
The Case of the Dead Lodger?”

“That's Perry Mason,” I replied automatically. To Riordan's puzzled frown, I explain, “All of the Perry Mason books use
The Case of
in the title.”

A red-nosed, bleary-eyed man came over to slap Matt's back and borrow the price of a drink. After giving him a five, Matt turned to me and shook his head. “That guy,” he said, “used to be a bail bondsman. Best in the business and rich as God. Now look at him—he'd drink it from a boot.”

Something about the man reminded me of the ugly burned-out hovel the Unknown Homicides called home. “At least Tito Fernandez is off the hook,” I remarked. “Button told me Ira Bellfield admitted having that fire set.

“I hope you're right,” I went on, “about this being the end of Linda's case. But both Lessek and Bellfield, after howling for their lawyers, denied that they had anything to do with her death.”

“What did you expect?” Matt shrugged. “Full confessions? Why should they admit anything they don't have to? The important thing is that the police have to follow up on the possibility that someone besides Linda's husband did away with her.”

“I guess,” I admitted, “it was a kind of a fantasy. That Brad would walk out of jail just as Lessek was walking in.”

“Give it time, Cass,” Matt Riordan advised. “Let the dank reality of life in a cell seep through to one of the bastards, and maybe he'll decide to put a knife into the other one.”

“You,” I said, only half-kidding, “are the most cynical man I've ever known.”

He responded with a twisted smile that would have done justice to the hero in a gothic romance. “How do you think,” he asked, “the Brooklyn DA's office made its case, such as it was, against the client I just got off? One of his fellow bribe-takers cut a deal. What the DA
didn't
tell the news media—but what I hammered home to the jury—was that Mr. State's Evidence got away with over a hundred thousand in bribes, whereas my poor schnook had at most fifteen thousand. It was like using the salmon to catch the minnow.”

“Catchy line,” I grinned.

“Highlight of the summation,” he admitted with an answering smile. Then he got serious. “What do you care,” he challenged, “what happens to the real killer, as long as Brad Ritchie goes free?”

He had me there. Dawn was my only concern; abstract justice was taking a backseat and I knew it. But I wasn't ready to admit it to Matt Riordan's knowing face, so I mumbled the word “cynical” again and got up to go to the ladies' room.

On the way back, wobbling slightly from an excess of Scotch, I noticed that the jukebox was playing a militant IRA song. All the mugs and glasses in the place were raised in an attitude of respectful belligerence, and at the bar, a hoarse voice cried, “I love you, Maggie Thatcher, but get your bloody troops out of my country!”

I looked over at Matt. His glass was raised, and his face was flushed as he sang along with the words of the song. One line referred to the “land that the English stole.” As he mouthed the words, all pretense of cynicism fell away, and I was looking at the face of Irish patriotism. The thought crossed my mind that the gun-running Matt had said took place at the Donegal Bay was something he knew firsthand. These Irishmen supported their case with bullets as well as maudlin ballads.

I spoke of none of this as I sat down in my chair and lifted my drink, noting dispassionately that the idealism had left Matt's face the minute he'd seen me return to my seat.

As we finished our drinks, the jukebox went into “The Wild Colonial Boy.” The red-haired barmaid held up her skirt and began a jig, her varicose-veined legs looking pretty good as she hopped in perfect time to the music. The men at the bar clapped her on, and she danced faster and faster, never missing a beat. She ended in a flurry of applause, her red hair flying, her face flushed. She acknowledged the audience with a pleased curtsy. Matt Riordan blew her a kiss as we stepped out into the night.

We went to Matt's apartment. His lovemaking was uncharacteristically tender, and I thought of the idealism he suppressed so ruthlessly in his professional life, but which surfaced in the boozy patriotism of the Donegal Bay. He was a man of contradictions, Matt, and I'd spent fruitless hours trying to sort them all out. Tonight I contented myself with snuggling against his chest, accepting his kisses, and letting myself feel protected, even comforted, by his presence.

The mood was broken by a phone call. The sleepy quality in Matt's voice vanished as he spoke into the receiver. He sat up in bed and fumbled for a pencil. “Fifth Precinct,” I heard him mumble. “Detective Malek. Okay. Just remember,” he instructed, his voice now completely lawyerly, “no questioning until I get there, or that confession won't be anything but toilet paper. And no lineup either. I'll be there in a half hour.”

He hung up the phone and turned to me, his face a study in rueful regret as he told me he had to go. But his voice was crisp, his eyes bright. He was already calculating, his head at the Fifth Precinct even as his body stood next to his bed.

“Somebody got busted?” I asked sleepily. He nodded.

“What kind of case?”

“Drugs,” he replied, then frowned. “Don't ask too many questions, Cass. For your own good.” He took his clothes into the bathroom and I put mine on in the bedroom.

Matt Riordan's compulsive secrecy about his clients had surprised me at first. Legal Aid lawyers routinely discussed cases, partly to seek advice from colleagues and partly just to let off steam. I'd unconsciously expected the same from Matt. But his caseload and his clients weren't society's losers but its winners. Their doings were too dangerous to discuss lightly.

I had to wonder sometimes why I continued to go out with a man whose secrets outnumbered by far the things he was willing to share with me. Large portions of Riordan's life were sealed off behind a barbed-wire fence. No Trespassing signs were everywhere, posted in several languages. Why did I keep coming back? I shrugged an answer; in spite of all that very private property, I liked the view.

Riding the subway at one
A
.
M
. didn't provide many pleasures. But there was one. Scrawled on the place where the map would have been was a great piece of graffiti:
Enola Gay
, it read,
the kiss she gives will never ever go away
.

Exhaustion hit when I got home. I fell into bed and slept like the dead until the phone woke me. It was the
Daily News
asking about Todd Lessek's arrest. I groggily gave the details the reporter wanted, then fell back into oblivion. Another bell from hell. The
Post
this time. I did it again. What with one thing and another, I got about as much sleep as Lawrence Block's insomniac spy, Evan Tanner.

Eyes gritty and head heavy, I dragged myself out of bed. Afraid to turn on the news in case I was on it, I stood in a hot shower until I began to feel alive again, then got dressed for work. I stopped into my office to pick up files and check my answering machine, and was on my way out the door when the phone rang.

It took a moment, in my fuzzy state, to recognize the thin, querulous voice. When I did, my heart sank. It was Hattie Hopkins, Terrell's grandmother.

“How could you do it?” she asked, her tone incredulous. “How could you let that boy plead guilty to something he didn't do?”

I opened my mouth to answer, but Hattie hadn't called to listen. “I suppose,” she said, “I didn't have enough money for you to go to trial like I wanted. If I was a rich woman, my boy wouldn't have to do time. He'd be home with me where he belongs, not locked up with animals.”

“Mrs. Hopkins,” I finally raised my voice, “did Terrell tell you he was innocent?”

“I know my boy,” she replied, a world of dignity in her tone. “He don't like me to worry, so he told me a lie to spare my feelings. He told me he robbed that boy, but I don't believe it for a minute. He just sayin' that to make me accept that he's going to be in jail. But I don't accept it. I don't accept it atall, and I don't aim to pay for a lawyer to put my boy in jail instead of gettin' him out like you should have done.”

“Mrs. Hopkins …” I began, but the line was dead. I could sue her for my fee, I supposed, but I knew I wouldn't. She'd suffer enough, I knew, riding the bus upstate once a month to see Terrell.

I put down the phone with an exasperated clank. One more of life's disappointments I had to deal with alone, I thought. Once upon a time, I'd have rushed straight into Nathan's office or Flaherty's cubicle at Legal Aid, poured out my tale of woe and received sympathetic advice. Or at least a smile and a reminder that it was, after all, a tough business.