Hostile Witness Part 55

"No, Chet. I a.s.sumed he was asking on behalf of Jimmy. Everything before with that account had always been on behalf of Jimmy." So that's what she had meant when she said Jimmy had asked her to deposit the money. But why had Concannon gone along with it? I looked at Chester. He had the same look of doubt his face had held before.

"How much was deposited?" I continued.

"I don't know the total, but each deposit was always just under ten thousand dollars."

"How many deposits?"

"Ten or fifteen."

"And what happened to the money?"

"I don't know firsthand," she said.

"Tell us what you know," I said.

"Objection, hearsay," said Prescott.

"Sustained," said the judge.

"Well, what had you heard?" I asked.

"Objection," said Prescott.

"Sustained," said Judge Gimbel. "Move on, Mr. Carl."

That line wasn't working. She didn't know enough to get out what I had wanted to get out about Norvel Goodwin and the money. Her knowledge was secondhand, her answers too indistinct. I looked over at the jury box. I saw a yawn. The sight of it cut me. I was losing them. I needed something big, now.

"All right, Miss Ashland, let's move on to Zack Bissonette." There was a pause, which sucked back the jury's attention. "Where did you meet him?"

"At his club. Jimmy, Chet, Chuckie, and I used to go there. That's how we met."

"How did you start dating?"

"Dating?" She tossed me a little smirk, just to let everyone know she was no cheerleader in a ponytail. "He asked me out one night at the club."

"While you were there with Jimmy?"

"Yes. Whatever his shortcomings, lack of gall was not one of them."

"And what did you say?"

"I gave him my phone number."

"You wrote it down for him?"

"I just told it to him. I figured if he was interested enough he would remember."

"And he remembered?"

"Yes. He called me the next day."

"And you went out together."

"Yes."

"Why, Miss Ashland? Why did you go out with Mr. Bissonette?"

"He was handsome, he had played baseball, poorly maybe, but he had played, he dressed in black, I don't know, I guess I couldn't think of a reason not to."

"Now when you started going out with Mr. Bissonette, were you using drugs?"

"No. Absolutely not."

"How long had you been drug-free?"

"Over two years."

"Did you see Mr. Bissonette many times?"

"A few."

"Did you sleep with him?"

"Yes, I slept with him."

"Did there come a time when you stopped seeing him?"

"Yes."

"Why?"

"I grew bored. I grow bored easily, Mr. Carl, as you know. He was boring, that's all."

"So you told him it was over."

"Yes."

"How did Mr. Bissonette take it?"

"Not very well. He wanted to keep seeing me. He insisted we keep going out."

"What happened?"

"I said no, that it was over."

"Did there come a time when you started seeing him again?"

"Yes."

"Why?"

"Well, he was begging, he was a pest. One night when I was bored, with nothing to do, I called and told him he could come over."

"Did he bring anything with him?"

"Yes."

"What?"

"He brought me cocaine."

I stepped back from the podium for a moment to let the last answer sink in. The points were being laid out and I wanted the connections to be drawn by the jurors before being made explicit by Veronica. I wanted them to expect to hear what Veronica would say, that Jimmy, who was violently opposed to drugs, had reacted violently once he found out that Bissonette had been first sleeping with and then supplying drugs to his mistress, a woman who had filled the gap in his life left from the drug death of his daughter. I wanted to set it up so that when Veronica gave voice to the obvious suspicions her response would be that much more believable. I turned around to look at the rest of the courtroom. There was Morris nodding at me, sitting next to Herm and Beth. Sloc.u.m was also in the audience, taking notes as he prepared for the murder trial. Behind Jimmy, where his wife usually sat, was an empty place in the benches. The courtroom artists were busily sketching the scene. Everything was perfectly in place. When whatever murmurs that had arisen from the cocaine response faded, I stepped back to the podium to continue.

"Did you take the cocaine that Mr. Bissonette offered?" I asked.

"Yes."

"Why, Miss Ashland, if you had been drug-free for over two years?"

"Because I missed it, and I was lonely, and I was disgusted that I had allowed a stiff like Zack back into my bedroom. Because I am not as strong a woman as I would like, Mr. Carl."

"Did you become addicted again?"

"Yes."

"Did you only get cocaine from Mr. Bissonette?"

"No."

"Where else?"

"Anywhere I could."

"Did you have another primary source?"

"Yes."

"Who, Ms. Ashland?"

"Norvel Goodwin," she said.

"The same man who had been selling out of that crack house on Fifty-first Street, the same man who Jimmy Moore had beaten with a chair?"

"Yes."

"Now, did there come a time that someone else found out about your renewed drug use?"

"Yes."

"And who was that?"

"Chet Concannon found out," she said.

She had made still another mistake that I had to correct. "You mean the councilman, don't you?"

"No," she said. "It was Chet who found out."

"And then Chester told the councilman?"

"No," she said. "Chet came right to me."

I gave her another chance. "So when did the councilman come over?"

"He never did. Chet had the limousine that night, he often used it, and he came over to my apartment after he found out."

"And you spoke?"

"Yes."

"And then he told the councilman?"

"No, that's not what happened. When he came over he was very upset, agitated. He demanded to know how I had started up again with drugs and when I told him that it was Bissonette he flew into a rage."

"It was the councilman in the rage, wasn't it?"

"No," she said, shaking her head. "No. You're not listening. It was Chet. He was often my beard on evenings when Jimmy wanted to bring his wife to a reception and then see me afterwards, and he began to fall in love with me. We had s.e.x once, one lonely evening, and it seemed to be important to him. I used to tease him about it, but it was real, I could see that. So when he found out about Bissonette he was furious, as angry as if I had been cheating on him. And the drugs, that made him even angrier. I pleaded with him not to tell the councilman, because I knew how angry he would get, how violent. He promised me he wouldn't, that he would take care of it himself. He said he would take care of it, that he had been stiffed out of another quarter of a million, that they had dropped him like a sucker and that by dealing with Bissonette he could take care of two birds with one bullet. That's what he said. I begged him not to do anything stupid but he told me not to worry about it, that he would take care of everything. And then he left. That's the last I saw of him that night. The next day I heard that Zack had been beaten into a coma. I was terrified."

I stared at her, shocked into silence, shocked enough to let her talk on and on, and talk on and on she did. While her other answers were short, two or three sentences at the most, this response seemed to last forever, and I felt helpless to stop her. I was so stunned I didn't even try. And when she had finished she sat on the stand looking straight at me, without even a breath of malice on her face.

In a weak voice I asked the judge for a moment, which he granted, and I walked unsteadily to Chester at the defense table. The doubt in his face had been replaced with anger. I leaned over him and whispered.

"Is any of this true?" I asked.

"No," he hissed.

"You f.u.c.ked her, didn't you?"

"You did too," said Chester viciously. "So what? The rest of that is c.r.a.p. What are you doing to me? What are you letting them do to me? You've sold me out."

Still leaning over Concannon, I glanced at Prescott, who was watching Chester and me with amus.e.m.e.nt on his thin lips. He looked at me and then through those thin f.u.c.king lips there arose the hint of a smile, the merest hint, but there it was. Where before I had seen his smile and read it as "Welcome to the club," this time I knew exactly what it meant, and what all the smiles before it had meant too. He smiled that slight smile at me and what that smile was saying, was shouting, was shrieking for the whole court to hear was, "Got you, you little small-time Jew b.a.s.t.a.r.d."

The feeling I had in that instant was like falling down a pit, falling without a parachute, without hope, fall falling. My stomach collapsed, my knees buckled, my eyes teared wildly, and spots appeared before me as my consciousness dipped. All I wanted to do at that moment was to heave and if I had anything in my stomach, if I had eaten Raffaello's d.a.m.ned cannoli, drunk a cup of coffee, anything, I'm sure I would have, right there in the middle of the courtroom, right there on the defense table, right there in front of the judge, the jury, right there in front of my client, Chester Concannon, my client, who had put his freedom in my hands and who now, I was certain, was going straight and irrevocably to jail.

Part V.