Hostile Witness Part 33

"Of course," she said. "Take this pa.s.s and go right through there. The men's locker room is on the left and there are signs to the various rooms." Her gaze drifted down to where my chest would have been had I had one. "Be sure to check out our free weight room."

I smiled back anyway and left the office, waving the pa.s.s casually at the beefy man in white guarding the entrance.

It wasn't very crowded at seven in the morning, a few haggard souls trying to sneak their workout in before they were awake enough to realize how crazy it was to take an elevator seven floors just to bound up an endless flight of mechanical stairs. In the men's locker room I grabbed a couple of towels and found a locker and stripped. I couldn't help but look at myself in the mirrors that surrounded the room. What I saw was pathetic. I would need to join a gym someday, but not this one, not one so sw.a.n.k.

With a towel around my waist, I followed signs to the men's sauna and steam rooms. The sauna was empty but in the steam room, lying on one of the tiled tiers, was a hard mound of flesh with a towel around its waist and over its face. I sat on a lower tier where it was still possible to breathe and waited for a moment as the steam floated about me and the sweat started sucking from my body.

When sweat dripped from my nose to my knees I said finally, "Enrico Raffaello didn't kill Bissonette."

"Good morning, Victor," said Jimmy Moore, without lifting the towel off his face.

Concannon had told me that Moore worked out at the Sporting Club every morning, primarily by sweating out the alcohol from the night before in the sauna or steam room, depending on his mood. It was directly to the councilman that the door Raffaello opened had led, it was Moore whose answers to the big questions I needed to hear.

"Where did you gather your startling bit of information?" he asked.

"From Raffaello himself."

"So you had an audience with the pope and the pope told you he's innocent."

"And I believe him," I said. "No reason for him to lie, his hands are already crimson. Which raises the question I have raised before and to which I still don't have an answer. Who killed Bissonette? Did you?"

He grabbed the towel off his face, sat up, and let out a long grunt that was like the baying of a great wounded mammal.

"If you want, councilman," I said, "you can have your attorney present when we have this conversation."

He pushed himself off his tier and stepped down, loosening the towel from his waist and letting it drop into the puddled steam slipping across the tiled floor to the drain. Beside the door was a cold-water shower and he turned it on. His muscles were turning slack and what was once a formidable chest was dropping, but what I noticed most clearly was the size of his p.r.i.c.k, which was big, huge, like a bull elephant's, it flopped down and hung there and the size of it was sickening. I wrapped the towel more tightly around my waist.

"I think I can handle this without Prescott's help," he said from inside the shower, water streaming down his face and body. "So you want to know if I killed the ballplayer. If I am a murderer. Because the way you figure it, it was me who beat him to death with a baseball bat."

"You've lied to Chester and me about who did it and you're setting up Chester for a fall. It doesn't make sense unless you killed him."

"Get dressed," he said, wiping his face with a towel and opening the steam room door. A blast of frigid air swirled in. "We have time for a morning drive before court."

"Do you know how I was first elected to City Council, Victor?" asked Jimmy Moore. We were inside the limousine now, driving north on Broad Street. Henry and the car had been waiting in the alley next to the old Bellevue Stratford, where the Sporting Club was situated. Inside the limousine was a tray of danish and a steel thermos, out of which Jimmy poured us each a cup of coffee. "Cream?" he asked.

"No, thank you," I said.

"I ran on an anti-busing platform," he said. "I opposed integration. I promised to keep our neighborhoods crimefree, which is political shorthand for white. You don't have to use Klan language to grab the racist vote. Talk about maintaining the integrity of the neighborhoods, talk about the scourge of crime, talk about protecting the American dream of home ownership and maintaining real estate values, talk about busing and the electorate understands. I even got into a fistfight in the Council chamber over a Gay Pride Day. I was opposed to it, of course. In my district the politics of hate were good politics and all I wanted was my city post, my city car, the power to make deals, so they were my politics too. The papers hated me, I was a joke, except that I carried my district with seventy-three percent of the vote."

"Where are we going?" I asked.

"Drugs were the other people's problem," he said, ignoring my question. "You know much about the gospels? No, of course not. Saul, an agent of the Jews and the scourge of Christianity, on his way to Damascus has a vision, hears a voice. 'Saul, Saul, why persecuteth thou me?' It is the voice of Jesus. At that moment he becomes a new man, he changes his name to Paul, he becomes Jesus's messenger on earth. Well, I didn't hear any voice. What I heard was a silence. My own daughter's silence. But it spoke to me just as clearly. 'Daddy. Daddy. Why forsaketh thou me?' And I didn't have an answer for her. Not a one."

He took a sip from his coffee and another, looking out the side window into the desolation of North Philadelphia.

"Now I do," he said.

"One of our most important programs here at the Nadine Moore Youth House," said Mrs. Diaz as she led Jimmy Moore and me through a tour of the facility, "is our community outreach program. Actually, it was at the councilman's insistence that we began the program and it has become the cornerstone of our effort. So often the only place children in trouble can receive help is through the criminal justice system and by then it is often too late. Through our education and outreach programs we can get hold of these children and deal with their problems before they enter the criminal system. That makes all the difference, we've found."

Mrs. Diaz was a handsome woman with broad cheekbones and strong hands. We were walking down a hallway running around the perimeter of the building. All the cla.s.srooms had windows facing the hallways, which gave the construction a large and airy feel, more like a fine office building than a prison school. We stopped in front of a cla.s.sroom where a group of twenty teenagers, dressed alike in white shirts and navy pants, were sitting in a semicircle around a teacher in goggles performing a chemistry experiment.

"The day for our children starts early in the morning," said Mrs. Diaz. "We have a regular school curriculum, supplemented in the afternoons with cla.s.ses designed to meet the specific needs of the individual child. The afternoon cla.s.ses include group therapy. What we have found is that these children go back to school with their scholastic skills improved to such a point that they excel, which is primarily why our graduates generally do so well on the outside. Through our monitoring and counseling program, which continues long after the children leave here, we have found that almost ninety percent have stayed off of drugs and out of trouble."

"Explain to Mr. Carl where our funding comes from, Loretta," said the councilman as we continued our walk down the hall.

"We get some support from the city," she said. "Councilman Moore has been able to secure for us some federal funds. And of course there are private donations. Whatever you'd like to give, Mr. Carl," she said with a warm smile, "would be greatly appreciated. And then CUP, Citizens for a United Philadelphia, has been extremely generous. In the past, whenever we have antic.i.p.ated a shortfall, CUP has balanced our budget."

We followed Loretta Diaz up a flight of stairs into a gym where a large cla.s.s of young men and women in their blue pants and white shirts were marching, in short-order drill, like soldiers on the parade ground. A teacher was barking out commands, "Left face. Right face. Quarterturn. About face," and the marchers were chanting together, to the beat of their footsteps, "We got to go home on our left, our right, we got to go home on our left, our right."

"There's a consensus growing around the country," said Mrs. Diaz, "that army-type discipline helps build self-esteem. So-called boot camps. I'm not so certain about whether it works or not, but the President is enamored with the idea and so it helps with the grant monies. As our plans for the future are ambitious, everything we can do to increase our funding we do. Besides, the children seem to actually like it."

"What exactly are your ambitions?" I asked as the footsteps of the marchers and the chanting rose around us. Left. Left. Your left, your right. Left.

"Oh, I'm sorry. I thought the councilman explained all that to you. The Nadine Moore Youth Home is a pilot program. We only have room in this facility for one student out of every thirty who are referred to us. Our goal is to build fifteen more here in Philadelphia and then expand into other cities. This home acts not only as a center for these children but also as a laboratory, and we expect our success here will serve as the model for a great bloom of healing. Our great hope," she said, as the councilman surveyed the troops marching to and fro on the basketball court, something wet and glistening in his eyes as they chanted, Sound off, one two, little louder, three four, kick it around, one two three four one two - threefour, "our great dream," she said, "is that for every child in this country struggling with drugs there be a Nadine Moore Youth Home to help her through her time of deepest need."

"This is our next one," he said. Henry had driven us to a vacant lot on Lehigh Avenue, across from a stream of crumbling row houses and boarded-up stores. A school was up the avenue just a bit. "The Art Museum fund-raiser gave us just enough to complete the effort. We start construction in two months. This will be twice the size of the facility you saw."

"It certainly is a grand ambition," I said.

"It will be her immortality," said Jimmy Moore. "After she died I realized that what had killed my daughter was not someone else's problem. It was everywhere. And I was in a position to do something about it. Something. For the first time I saw what politics could be about and it was not about hating or getting. That was when my pa.s.sion reared and my mission began. First fight the dealers, then heal the children. We are making progress on both fronts and when I become mayor we'll win it all. We'll put the lords of death out of business and build those youth homes throughout the city. And not just homes, youth centers, boys' clubs and girls' clubs. I can do it. I will do it. It was as good as done before they set me up."

"Who set you up?"

"I don't know exactly. Maybe the mayor, maybe the dealers. I was in danger before the indictment. Why do you think I ride around in that limousine? My City Council car was shot up more than once by my enemies. But my black beauty is bulletproof now and I continue on. Then the feds, after consulting with the mayor, determined my fund-raising extortionate. And even if it is, so what? The money is going to the right place. But then came the murder and the arson and they decided to pin that on me too."

"So you didn't kill Bissonette?"

He turned to me and looked me square in the eye. "No," he said without a flicker of his eye, without a hesitation in his voice. "Absolutely not. Why would I kill that boy? For money? That's the problem with prosecutors, they're so willing to sell out for a small piece of change they think everyone else is too. I'm on the track to something big, huge, and you've just seen the tip of it. Besides, did you know that the money Bissonette was able to mysteriously raise for Ruffing came from Raffaello?"

So that was what Raffaello had meant when he said Jimmy was too smart to kill as part of the extortion plot. What he meant was that Jimmy was too smart to fight him. "If you didn't kill him, why are you setting up Chester to take the fall?" I asked.

"Because I don't have a choice," he said quickly.

"Bulls.h.i.t."

He let out a sigh, took out a cigarette, tapped it on its box, and lit it. "Maybe it is bulls.h.i.t. Maybe I'm just a coward, I don't know. I hire a lawyer, the best in the city, and I tell him to do anything he has to do to get me off and save my dream. He's a hard b.a.s.t.a.r.d, clever, and what he tells me is that if he can't prove who actually did the killing, the only way to get me off is to go after Chet. He told me we needed an attorney to represent Chet who wouldn't get in the way. Someone he could control. First it was McCrae. But then he took his ill-advised trip to Chinatown and so we needed someone else."

"And that was me," I said bitterly. The cabana boy.

"He told me it was my only choice. That if it works right it will make the government's case look so weak we might both get off." Jimmy took a deep drag from the cigarette and let it out slowly. "So I told him to go ahead."

"Even if Chester ended up behind bars for good."

"What do you think, I like this? I don't have a choice. No choice at all. We're in a war here, fighting to build something grand and n.o.ble, but as in any war there will be casualties. Concannon might be one. I'll take care of Chet, and he knows it. But my enemies are coming after me. I won't let them win. If they do, it is the children who will pay the price. We need you to stick with us, to follow Prescott's direction and foil the government's plot against me. I brought you here so you would be aware of all you are endangering if you oppose us. Together we can make a difference." He flicked his cigarette onto a tuft of weeds sprouting through cracked brick and it smoldered there. "If you want, I'll put you on the board of CUP. A terrific position for a young lawyer. Together we can change the world for the better."

That would be a terrific position for me, I knew. It was on charitable boards and political committees that lawyers found clients. Serve on enough boards, get enough clients, and you become a rainmaker, with the power to go to any firm in the city and name a price. I didn't jump right away onto my hind legs and say, "Okay," but I was thinking.

"So who killed him?" I asked.

"I don't know," he spit out. "G.o.d, I wish I did. You're the man with the theories, you find out. See if you can do any better than we did."

I looked out over the vacant lot and then the neighborhood. There was something eerily familiar about it. "What number is this?" I asked.

"Nineteenth Street."

Now I knew where I was. The old baseball stadium had been a block away. Connie Mack Stadium. Where the park had been was now a big modern brick church, like a giant McDonald's, but when it had still been a ballyard my grandfather had brought me there to watch the Phillies play. He called it Shibe Park, its old name. We'd sit in the bleachers and chant, "Go Phillies Go," and watch Willie Mays beat the h.e.l.l out of the home team. Richie Allen and Clay Dalrymple, Jim Bunning and Johnny Callison. And Gene Mauch sitting in the dugout, his dark face in the pained squint that became permanent after the team collapsed in '64. But what I remembered right then was not just the baseball but the young boy holding his grandfather's hand, walking past the parked cars on 20th Street to get into the park. How had he become me?

"Where's the rest of the money?" I asked, suddenly tired of the dog-and-pony show, tired of Jimmy Moore's self-righteousness. "The missing quarter-million."

"I don't know," he said, his arm spreading over his vacant lot. "But it's going to end up here, I'll make d.a.m.n sure of it, and in the others we will build. I'm working on it as we speak."

"Mr. Raffaello wants his share."

"Not a penny," he shouted. "They sell their poison right under his nose and it's fine so long as he gets his cut. He's a disgrace. I'd sooner die."

"I'm sure he could arrange it."

"Let him try. If he wants a war that's what he'll get." He pointed a thick finger at me. "I'm ready to take him on and take on anyone else who gets in my way. We're going to fill this vacant lot and fourteen like it with facilities that will heal a generation. It is my mission, and I will do anything to protect it. Anything. My mission is all I have left to care about now."

I guess it all was getting to me, the false n.o.bility, the lies, the inevitable bribes, a deal here, a settlement there, a position on an influential board. Was it so clear that I could be bought, was a "FOR SALE" sign printed on my face, unmistakable above my watery eyes. I hated it, especially here, where I felt haunted by the little shoe merchant and the young boy holding his hand. I couldn't help my anger from bubbling out. Even so, I might have kept quiet if his p.r.i.c.k hadn't been so d.a.m.ned thick. But when he got all self-righteous on me I thought of the sight of him in that cold shower and I got even angrier and I said, "But that's not the only thing to still care about, is it, councilman?"

"What else could there be?" he asked, his voice as plaintive as if there could be nothing.

"f.u.c.king Veronica," I said.

I regretted it immediately, regretted it all the more when he turned his startled face to me. It was twisted strangely into a mask that proclaimed both helplessness and need and, for the first time since I met him, Jimmy Moore was speechless.

But from what Veronica had told me and from the mask on Jimmy Moore's face I could piece it all together. Still in a rage from his daughter's death, he bursts into a crack house and sees her on the floor, helpless and high, about the same age as his daughter would have been, this pretty young girl on drugs, as pretty as his daughter. She might even have looked like her. And he shelters her in his car and takes her to a treatment center and saves her life, like he had been unable to save his daughter's life. And he visits her, his surrogate, and he makes sure she is cured, and bit by bit some deep desire starts rising from the forbidden, locked portions of his soul and he finds that he can't help himself, the unthinkable has become real, the impossible had become inevitable, and it is finer than any imagining.

36.

YOU CAN LEARN EVERYTHING about a man by learning what he truly wants. I had seen the bricks and gla.s.s of Jimmy Moore's greatest ambitions; they dwarfed my own in grandeur and worth. I felt a strange, sad sympathy for Moore, with his grand dreams of healing and his own hopeless love for Veronica Ashland, both built on a foundation of tragedy, and truly I hoped his grand dreams could all come true. But not over the rotting carca.s.s of my client.

"We need to talk," I said into the pay phone, taking no chances on a tap.

"My office, at five," said Sloc.u.m.

"Forget it," I said. "Last time I went there it made the front page of the Daily News."

"You got some heat, huh?"

"Like Las Vegas in August."

"Never been."

"Hot," I said. "Let's find a bar."

"Dublin Inn?"

"Too many ADAs. How about Chaucer's?"

"Fine," he said. "Make it later then. Eight o'clock. Something interesting?"

"You'll think so," I said, and I knew he would.

See, Prescott made a mistake, really. Had he treated me with the respect I craved, had he taken me to lunch as his guest at the Union League, at the Philadelphia Club, had he welcomed me with open arms into the fraternity of success, I might have sat quietly, willingly, and let Concannon eat whatever s.h.i.t Prescott served him. But the b.a.s.t.a.r.d had threatened me, given me orders, turned me into his cabana boy, and that was his mistake. In the rush of my late-night prowlings with Jimmy Moore and his entourage, of my society functions, of my mentorship with Prescott, of my s.e.xual obsession with Veronica, of my work and play with the Bishop brothers, of this new life that had seemingly been granted me, in the midst of it all I had lost my resentment for a while. But it was back, with a vengeance. It slipped over my shoulders like a favorite old sweater and it felt d.a.m.n good. Even if the orders from my client prohibited me from actively engaging in the trial, even if my cut of the Saltz settlement and my deals with the Bishops and my directorship of CUP required my formal obeisance in court to Prescott, even if all that, my resentment still demanded I do something, anything, something, no matter the consequence. Concerning the mystery of who killed Bissonette, Jimmy Moore had said, "You're the man with the theories, you find out." So maybe I would.

What I had discovered from Raffaello was that Bissonette might have been killed because he was playing around with the wrong woman, so now all I had to do was find Bissonette's final fatal love. Lauren Amber Guthrie and her jangling gold bracelets? Maybe. Some other woman with a husband bent for revenge? Possibly. Or was it Chuckie Lamb after all, silencing the one witness who could connect him to everything? And what about the missing quarter of a million dollars, two-fifths of which was owed to Enrico Raffaello and the rest of the downtown boys? I wanted answers and quickly, before Eggert started nailing the shingles on the roof of the jail Prescott was building around Chester Concannon and before Raffaello started pressing me for information. Which is why I had called the man with the grand jury subpoenas, my old friend K. Lawrence Sloc.u.m, ADA.

Chaucer's was a friendly sort of neighborhood saloon with a famous shuffle bowling game, cheap paneling, stained-gla.s.s windows in the doors, and deep booths where groups of kids right out of college could sit and drink pitchers and gossip about other kids right out of college. When I first started going there it was filled with older, blue-collar types, with truck drivers, with lesbians who dressed like truck drivers, with college dropouts who ruefully discussed their dubious futures. But it no longer had that type of charm. Now the boys wore their baseball caps backwards, ponytails spilling out beneath the brims, the girls sheathed their long legs in black leotards, and they were all college graduates, discussing their dubious futures with pride. I still drank there, but now I felt too old to be a part and that was scary and sad both. I still remembered when it was a thrill just to be inside a bar, when the soft lighting and cigarette smoke and strangers on the stools whispered something so seductive I couldn't believe I could just walk in, sit down, and order a beer. But now I was one of the older and the sadder and the people slipping in were younger, gayer, more vibrant than I. Now I knew what the older people in the bars used to think of me because I knew what I thought of this new generation. I wished they all would just go home to their mamas.

Sloc.u.m and I were sitting in one of those deep booths toward the rear of the bar. The waitress had given us each a bottle of Rolling Rock and a gla.s.s and each of us had ignored the gla.s.s. I almost liked Sloc.u.m. He took it all very seriously, as one would want a public prosecutor to take it all very seriously, but he had a sense of humor, too. It was a weary sense of humor, that was the only type a prosecutor would ever allow himself, but even a weary sense of humor put him leagues ahead of the rest. I told him the whole story of my meeting with Raffaello, although I left out the part where he called his daughter a s.l.u.t. I still remembered that Jasper and Dominic believed nothing was as important as keeping one's word, and though I almost liked Sloc.u.m, I wasn't willing to bet my life on whether or not he had a connection to Raffaello. Everyone else seemed to in this burg.

"He said it was a jealous husband?" asked Sloc.u.m.

"He didn't give me specifics."

"So right now it's just a mystery girl."

"Right," I said.

"And you want me to check it out?"

"Yes."

"To send out my detectives to find that girl?"

"That would be terrific."

"You want me to send out my detectives to find this mystery girl, the existence of whom was disclosed by the biggest criminal in the city, all in an effort to destroy my murder case against your client."

"Exactly."

"I don't think so."

"Larry, an innocent man is getting railroaded here."

"Or maybe Raffaello's lying. You ever consider that gangsters sometimes lie? Nothing happens in this town without him getting a cut. Maybe he was part of the whole thing and now he's throwing out false leads to take the heat off his compares."

"I don't believe that," I said. "Not for a minute. What I believe is that you've got the wrong guys facing death row and you don't want to admit it."

He shrugged, like he wasn't certain that I was wrong. "Maybe, Carl. It happens. But you're going to have to do your own investigating. How much you getting an hour for this case? No, don't tell me, it'll just make me ill. Earn your money, find the girl yourself." He rubbed his hand over his mouth and looked at me for a moment. "But maybe I can help."