Antonelli - 03 - The Judgment (35 page)

I nodded toward her nearly empty glass. “Drink your Coke. We have to get out of here. It’s a long drive home.”

I waited until she bent her head over the glass and took the tip of the straw in her mouth.

“I’m going to ask you this just once. Will you marry me? Not next year, or next month. Just, will you marry me?”

Her eyes still on the glass, she began to smile. Then she looked up.

“Yes.”

That is all that was said, all that had to be said. We sat there for a few more minutes while she finished her Coke and I wondered why marriage, as opposed to simply living together, had assumed such an importance in my mind. We were past the age when marriage meant children. Perhaps it was a way to show defiance to the long years we had been apart. I suppose it would also put a period to the sentence that would seem to strangers to explain our lives: “We fell in love, and then we were married.”

Jennifer finished her Coke, and I helped her up from the table.

“We can always tell people we had a very long engagement,” she said with a smile. Suddenly, her head shuddered and her eyes flashed with pain. She gripped my hand with all her strength.

“I’m all right,” she said, trying to apologize. “I’m just tired, and it hit me kind of fast.”

By the time we got to the car, she seemed fine, but when I insisted on driving she did not object. As we drove through the darkness, she curled up beside me and was fast asleep before we had gone more than a mile.

The next morning, Helen, as usual, followed me into my office, a high-heeled tap dance accompanied by shouted instructions about what I was supposed to be doing.

“I finally reached Dr. Friedman’s office down at the state hospital. He’s out of town this week and won’t be back until Monday. I said we’d call back.” Helen looked at her notebook and found the next item on her list. “The records clerk called from the courthouse. The file on the Elliott Winston case came over from Archives. You can look at it anytime you want.” Her eyes went back to the notebook.

“I’m getting married, Helen.”

“Somebody named … ?” She looked up, puzzled, and for a moment searched my eyes. The tiny lines at the corners of her eyes and the lines at the corners of her mouth seemed to fade away.

She dropped into the chair and put her hand on her heart.

“Really?” she asked. Her eyes sparkled and a huge grin spread across her face. “To the girl you wanted to marry, years ago, the one you went to high school with?”

I could not remember ever having told her about that, but it did not surprise me that she knew. She started to say something and then, changing her mind, came around the desk and kissed me on the cheek. There was an awkward silence, and then, because that kiss had said everything there was to say, she offered a few words of congratulations and I replied with a few words of thanks.

“I have a lot to do today,” I said finally. “I don’t know if I’ll have a chance to see that file or not. Would you call the records clerk back and ask if they would hang on to it for a while.”

A few minutes later, I heard Helen on the phone. There was one thing I could find out without going to the courthouse and reading it in the file. I picked up the line and asked the records clerk to tell me the name of the attorney who had represented Elliott Winston. She told me and I asked once more to make sure I had heard her right, and one more time after that because I still did not believe it.

“But Asa Bartram never practiced criminal law in his life,” I said, as if this was something the clerk would either know or have reason to care about.

“Sorry,” I said, more baffled than ever by what had happened, and more certain than ever that it was somehow the answer to everything.

Twenty-one

_______

Now that we were to be married, Jennifer moved in with me and we spent five days alone together, trying not to talk too much about the things we had missed. Middle-aged, all the glam-our gone, we spent the passion we had left and learned the gentler sentiments of love.

Early the next Sunday evening we left the house I would never again live in alone and drove down the long sloping driveway, through the open iron gate to the street below. She could not stop laughing.

“You look just awful!”

“This is how I earn my living,” I said, deadpan. “The law is a noble profession.”

“Try going to court looking like that.”

“I did—once,” I replied.

She nodded. “The time you went to jail. I wasn’t there to see it, but—trust me—you look a lot worse now. You’ll probably get picked up by the police and put in jail again.”

She drove me into town and dropped me off on a dark corner next to a small park, a block away from a mission where the homeless could sometimes get a meal and a bed.

“Are you going to be warm enough?” she asked as I opened the door. “There’s a chill in the air. It’s going to get cold tonight.”

She stared at me with large, melancholy eyes. “Look at you! We haven’t even lived together a week, and you don’t shave, you dress like a bum, and you make up the most outrageous excuse any woman ever heard about why you have to spend the night away from home.”

“You going to be all right?” I asked as I leaned over to kiss her goodbye.

She held me for a long time, laughing quietly about how rough my face felt with its scraggly five-day growth, teasing me that I smelled too good to pass for homeless. When she was certain I did not want to go, she pretended she did not mind and with one last kiss let me leave. With my hands shoved into the pockets of an old, ragged, oversize wool coat, I watched her drive away and then, when she was gone, turned around and walked slowly into the night.

There was at first a feeling of adventure, like someone starting out on a voyage, when danger and hardship still seem like a romance, and hunger and thirst are things you talk about on a full stomach. I was doing this to find out what I could about who had killed Quincy Griswald and then given the murder weapon to someone who would not be able to explain where it had come from. But deep down I also wanted to know what it was like to live like this: homeless and abandoned, surrounded by things you could not have and people who, when they saw you coming, would cross the street to get away.

It was not yet completely dark. A man and a woman coming from the opposite direction saw me and moved as far away on the sidewalk as they could. I went right for them and held out my hand.

“Spare change?” I asked in a harsh, rasping voice. My head rolled to the side and my chin sagged down to my chest. “Haven’t had anything to eat all day,” I said, pleading with my eyes.

He did what I probably would have done. He put his arm around her and tried to shelter her with his shoulder. She was pretty and well dressed, and as they hurried past she looked at me with loathing and disgust.

I had gotten away with it and I felt a thrill of exhilaration.

“All right,” I yelled after them in my normal voice, “if you don’t have any change, how about the keys to the BMW?”

The man shot a glance at me over his shoulder and then quickened his step, afraid I might follow.

I crossed the street to the mission and studied the dead eyes of the men who were sprawled against the front brick wall near the entrance, waiting for it to open, as I walked past them and turned the corner. Cheap hotels with dirty windows and dimly lit bars with shadows sliding slowly across the floor; hookers in short tight dresses and junkies with vapid smug smiles and pockmarked faces; fat men with fat wallets ready to buy a good time, and haggard tired women no one wanted trying to forget they had no one waiting at home: This was the world I now entered instead of my own.

In an alleyway behind an adult bookstore I rummaged through the trash cans and watched the people who came in and out the back entrance, and realized I had become invisible. A girl in a black leather miniskirt led a short, paunchy man out the door, watched with calculating eyes while he counted out the money, tucked it in her bra, and then got down on her knees in front of him and did what she had been paid for. When she finished, she watched him walk nervously down the alley toward the sidewalk, and then turned to me, searching through the garbage less than ten feet away.

“I’ll bet you wish you could have some,” she said with a smirk, and then disappeared inside.

I had just bent down to look inside the next garbage can when, suddenly, I went flying over it, and landed in a heap on the other side, buried under the trash that collapsed on top of me. Twisting around, I pulled my head up, tried to get to my feet, and was shoved back. A hulking wreck of a human being, with stinking breath and a slobbering mouth that looked like it bred corrup-tion, was waving his arm at me and pointing a finger at his chest.

“This is yours?” I asked, as I scrambled sideways to get beyond his reach. “Yours?” I asked, nodding. I kept moving, and kept repeating the same question, letting him know that my trespass was entirely inadvertent. “Sorry,” I said when I was far enough away from him to risk struggling to my feet. I backed down the alley, apologizing, and then, when I was safe, turned around and walked away as quickly as I could.

Late that night I made my way to the Morrison Street Bridge.

I dragged a few rotting pieces of cardboard I found under the bushes, and crawled underneath this makeshift blanket. The ground was hard, cold, jagged with rocks, and each time I turned over there were only a few moments of relief before I started to hurt in a new place. I hardly slept at all that night, and never for very long. Though I could not clearly see more than a few of them when I first arrived, I could sense that there were breathing bodies scattered all around. Years had passed, but the memory I had of the nights spent in the county jail was still vivid in my mind. This was not like that. No one cried out; no one moaned or whimpered or cursed; no one made a noise, nothing, except the heavy rolling sound of people who were sleeping in their own beds, the only ones they knew.

I did not think I had slept at all, but when I opened my eyes the sun was out and the traffic on the bridge overhead was deafening. My mouth felt like glue and my teeth hurt. I climbed out from under the cardboard blanket and looked around. Down at the edge of the river, two men stood side by side, urinating. Off to the side, sitting on his haunches, another man soaked his shirt and then wrung it out with his hands. On the shadows next to the concrete pilings, four men were gathered around a small fire, warming their hands while water boiled in a blue aluminum pot.

No one moved aside to let me in, and I stood a few feet away.

The one who had been doing his laundry in the river came back, carrying his shirt in his hand.

“Let him in,” he said as he sat down in the circle. “Come on,”

he insisted when at first I did not move. They made room, and I joined them. No one said anything, and looking at them, dull-eyed and lethargic, I wondered how many knew how.

“It’s the best coffee in town,” the man said, urging me to drink it. My eye darted to the river behind him. He shook his head.

“The water came from a fountain. I fill my canteen.”

I wondered if, with that careless glance, I had given myself away. With a blank look, as if I had no idea why he thought he had to explain something so obvious, I tried to cover my mistake. My eye still on him, I took a drink, and almost gagged on the rancid taste. He watched me for a moment longer, and then, smiling to himself, lowered his gaze.

No one said anything, not to me, not to anyone. They sat in a circle, drinking that awful brew, made, I discovered later, from the used coffee grinds found in the garbage behind one of my favorite restaurants. Then, a few minutes later, as if by some silent signal that passed my notice, they got to their feet and, without a word, drifted off in different directions.

The one who had given me the cup lingered behind. “You coming back tonight?” he asked.

I let him know with a look that it was none of his business what I did. If he thought my belligerence a threat, he did not show it. He reached inside his overcoat pocket and brought out a half-pint bottle of whiskey and offered it to me.

“Suit yourself,” he said when I refused. Removing the cap, he took a short swig and wiped his mouth with the back of his tattered, greasy sleeve. “Helps keep the coffee down,” he explained as he shoved the bottle back in his pocket.

I started to walk away. “You can come with me, if you want,”

he said. I stopped and looked back. He had already turned and was heading along a path that led under the bridge and came up on the other side. I followed behind and when we reached the top, he moved a bush aside and pulled out a rusty shopping cart heaped with black garbage bags stuffed full. Craning his neck, he squinted up at the glaring white sky. His lips pressed tight together, he moved his mouth back and forth while he made up his mind. Opening the bag on top, he dug out an olive green army camouflage jacket. He took off the overcoat, rolled it into a ball, and shoved it as far down in the basket as it would go and then put on the jacket.

We worked our way through town, stopping at every trash basket. A division of labor soon developed between master and ap-prentice: I pushed the cart, and each time we halted, he did a thorough search, deciding what was useless and what had value.

He always found something, a bottle, a can, something that could be turned into cash. When we reached the park behind the courthouse, I remembered the two men I had seen there late at night, doing what we were doing now, my own life somehow prefigured in that dreamlike apparition from the past.

On the sidewalk outside the courthouse entrance, afraid I might be recognized, I left my newfound friend and partner to rummage through the wire mesh trash baskets alone. I stood off to the side, next to a lamppost at the curb, watching people I knew at least vaguely going in and out the doors. Hunching my shoulders, I pulled the flaps of the cap I was wearing farther down over my ears. I ran my fingers over my beard and felt a little more confident that at least at a distance no one would know it was me.