“Hey, that’s the lady,” says Freakshow Slim on the left.
He points to a big blonde woman struggling to get out of a broken-down Town & Country station wagon with a blue food cooler. Sister Patrice, from Manhasset. She crosses the street, getting the keys out of her red barn jacket.
“You got to put deli to deli,” says Mao.
“Shut up, fool.” Charles is already backing away from the group. Weirded out by the sudden proximity to the meeting, where the fluorescent lights will be bright, the coffee will be lukewarm, and the expectations for him to stay clean will be serious. “I’m outta here. I’m gonna get high. Then I’m gonna go get some stinky on my hangy-down thang.”
“You mean you’re gonna get laid?” John asks.
“Yeah.”
“I doubt that,” says John, who wishes he were going with him anyway—women or no women.
Charles’s face shrivels in the wind. “Yeah, me too.”
He scoots across the street, leaving John to figure out the best way to say he’s sorry.
48
Jake’s secretary, Deborah, is home sick with a savage yeast infection, so he’s having to field some of his own calls.
“Mr. Schiff?”
“Yeah.”
“Please hold for J. Harrell Pearson.”
Jake silently curses to himself. J. Harrell Pearson is the head of the fourth-largest motor oil company in the country. He is calling to scream. J. Harrell likes to scream. In fact, he likes screaming better than most people like eating. Sometimes he’ll experience spontaneous nosebleeds while berating a boardroom full of junior executives. This time he is almost certainly calling to scream because Jake and the accountants he’s brought in have only managed to put him in the second-lowest tax bracket possible, instead of the lowest. J. Harrell will be handing the government no larger a proportion of his income than a city bus driver, yet he will still shriek about having been raped.
Jake braces himself for the opening salvo as a buzzer goes off on his phone. There’s a knock at the door. Someone is coming in. He tries to remember if he asked for coffee and a bagel this morning. If Deborah were here, she’d have it organized. Instead, somebody else’s secretary is buzzing the delivery boy in, probably while keeping two clients on hold on the phone.
Jake half rises as his door opens and a man who looks like the Las Vegas singer Jerry Vale walks briskly into the room.
“Mr. Schiff, you’re under arrest,” he says, whipping out a black billfold and displaying a gold shield.
Jake’s eyes flick over to the left and he sees two young uniform officers with well-defined bodies and unformed faces have followed the man with the shield into the room. Meanwhile, J. Harrell Pearson has gotten on the phone.
“Schiff, goddamn it, how could you do this to me?!” he squawks. “Have you no compassion?!”
It’s a moment so surreal and disorienting that all Jake can think to ask himself is: Why is Jerry Vale trying to arrest me?
“Mr. Schiff, please put the phone down,” says the man with the gold shield, who is clearly a detective.
“Harrell, I gotta go,” Jake says into the phone.
“Don’t hang up on me! I won’t pay this bill . . .”
The phone goes back on the hook and Jake stands there, looking from the detective to the two uniform cops. For several days he’s been telling himself this scene might take place, but now he finds himself totally unprepared, a diver without swimming lessons. Somehow, despite all his knowledge and experience, he’d been hoping Susan Hoffman could have made these charges go away.
“Mr. Schiff, my name is Marinelli. I’m from the Midtown North detective squad,” says the detective, dropping the billfold and the shield back into a pocket of his brown suit. “Please stand against the desk and assume the position.”
“Come on, guys.” Jake holds up his hands. “We don’t have to do it this way. We all know the drill here. You could’ve called my lawyer. I would’ve surrendered downtown.”
“Assume the position,” says the detective, hardening his voice and giving him no slack.
He turns to one of the uniformed cops, a pale pug-nosed kid who can’t be more than five years older than Alex. “Go ahead, frisk him,” he says.
Jake dutifully turns his back, spreads his legs, and puts both hands on the edge of his desk. They’re really going to do this, he thinks. Unbelievable. They probably have a special routine worked out to punish defense lawyers.
The young cop starts out by slapping both of Jake’s thighs, still a little sore from the run in the park with Dana last weekend. The kid brings his right hand up sharply as if he’s about to grab Jake’s balls and Jake starts to pull away a little.
“Easy there, pally,” says the young cop.
“You know this isn’t right,” says Jake. “We could still work things out. I’ll call my lawyer, we’ll meet you down in Part Forty-seven.”
“We do things by the book here,” the detective says in his sour rhythmless voice. He turns to the other young cop, a strapping buck with puffy cheeks and a pencil-thin moustache. “Cuff him already. In the front.”
Jake presents his wrists and the cop with the moustache puts the handcuffs on as tight as he can. His name tag says Pollo. Chicken. Jake tries to catch his eye and nod as if to say, It’s okay, you’re just doing your job. Anything. Just to stimulate a little human contact and make things easier further down the line. But the young cop steadfastly refuses to look at him. He’s probably been coached beforehand, Jake realizes.
“All right, let’s walk him,” says Detective Marinelli.
“Look,” says Jake. “I got a trench coat in my closet over there. Maybe you can just throw it over my hands, so everyone outside doesn’t see the cuffs.”
They all ignore him and Jake decides to keep his mouth shut. Every time he says something, it just encourages them to mistreat him. Clearly, the decision has been made somewhere up the chain of command to maximize embarrassment with this arrest.
The detective leads the way out the door with the two younger cops coming up behind Jake.
Word has spread quickly across the office and a crowd has gathered around Deborah’s empty desk. If she’d been here, Jake thinks, the cops wouldn’t have been able to get in without her giving him fair warning. Instead, the secretaries, paralegals, associates, and senior partners have all had a chance to stop what they are doing and come to watch his moment of ultimate humiliation.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” says the detective, stopping to address the crowd, “this man is being arrested for the charge of murder. Officers from our precinct will be back in a few hours to
recanvass this office. We would appreciate your cooperation. Thank you.”
Jake sees Todd Bracken watching from the edge of the crowd with a look of surprised wonder. With his open mouth, he could be saying,
Why, I didn’t know you sailed, Jake.
Deeper in the pack, Mike Sayon and Charlie Dorian exchange grim huffy looks. What will this mean for the image of the firm? You can almost hear them telecommunicating like a couple of wizened old extraterrestrials in a Spielberg film. Next to them, Kenneth Daugherty looks as if he’s enduring the suffering of the ages. Since Todd Bracken’s father died, Kenneth has assumed the position of the firm’s grand old man. Only a select few knew he was actually a doddering idiot who hid in his office all day playing Game Boy.
Jake hears the murmurs and sees attractive women who’d once given him appraising looks casting their eyes down. Just to complete the spectacle of shame, Detective Marinelli begins to recite his Miranda rights for the benefit of the crowd, stumbling a few times because he’s clearly out of practice. Obviously, the crack-heads and drunken miscreants he usually arrests don’t get the full warning.
“You have the right to an attorney,” says the detective, putting special emphasis on the words. “If you cannot afford an attorney, one will be provided for you.”
Jake looks up at the room full of lawyers. A sea of gray flannel and cold eyes. He feels like a fish caught in the jaws of a larger predator while the rest of the natural order looks on impassively.
“Call my wife,” he says as the cops start to take him away. “Somebody please call my wife.”
There’s some stirring in the crowd. Todd Bracken peels off to go back to his office. Mike Sayon claps a hand on Charlie Dorian’s shoulder, as if he’s the one in need of comfort. And old Kenneth Daugherty is busy staring down into a secretary’s cleavage. Life in the office is already going back to normal. Bills will be sent, phone calls will be returned, motions will be answered. And after ten years at this firm, Jake realizes he doesn’t have anyone who’s enough of a friend to even call his family for him.
49
Mr. Cardi, will you please tell us why you decided to cooperate as a witness in the case against Mr. Schiff?”
“I felt it was my duty as a citizen,” says Philip.
He’s sitting in a book-lined conference room at the Manhattan DA’s office, being questioned by Ms. Fusco again. His new lawyer, a sandy-haired, ruddy-faced guy named Jim Dunning, sits in a corner quietly, like he’s dying for a cigarette. The lighting is less harsh and the coffee is a little stronger than in the other rooms he’s been in here.
“Wouldn’t it be more accurate to say that you were arrested on a different charge and decided to make a deal?” Ms. Fusco says, like a schoolteacher correcting a remedial student.
Philip twists in his chair. “That’s one way of looking at it.”
“And isn’t it true, Mr. Cardi, that the other charge stemmed from an incident in which you cut off another man’s nipple?”
Philip frowns, waits for his lawyer to interrupt, then raises his hand. “Forgive me, miss,” he says. “But is it really necessary for us to reexamine all this bullshit? I mean, we’re not Boy Scouts, right? We all know what I’m doing here.”
Ms. Fusco stands up, making her hemline drop and ruining Philip’s view of her knees.
“Listen, Philip. Mr. Schiff has just been taken into custody. This is a very important case to our office. If you’re going to
testify before a jury at trial, we have to establish your credibility and your motivation. So don’t fuck around.”
“What are you worried about?” His lawyer, Dunning, finally speaks up. “You’ve got Philip here, you’ve got his cousin Ronnie, you got Jake’s prints on the bat. You even got one of the bums from the tunnel saying he saw Jake down there. When I was with the DA’s office I made cases with a helluva lot less.”
“Well, it’s not your case to try, is it?” Ms. Fusco replies snippily. “We still don’t know what that other homeless guy, Gates, would say if he showed up.”
“Ah, forget it,” says Philip. “He’s probably dead by now anyway.”
His lawyer gives him an uncomfortable look.
“We’re not forgetting anything here,” says Ms. Fusco. “The DA doesn’t want to lose this case.”
Philip looks at the folder in her hand and notices for the first time that she’s bitten her nails down to bloody nubs. The bitch is nervous. Really nervous. Really scared. He likes that. She must’ve gone to old Norm McCarthy and told him they had enough evidence to make a case before she was ready. Maybe even rubbed his arthritic knee a little to get his motor revved.
Now she’s got her tit caught in a wringer. She needs help from her buddy Philip. He has leverage. Come to Papa.
“You know what I’m thinking?” he says, throwing out his right arm. “I’m thinking I don’t like it here so much. I’m thinking maybe I could help you a little more if I was out on the street. It might improve my memory some, being able to walk around.”
Her face darkens. “I doubt that’s possible.”
“Why not?” says Dunning, picking up on Philip’s lead for once. “You let cooperating witnesses go all the time. You even pay some of them. I had a kid from out in Mill Basin who made seventy thousand dollars testifying against his father’s gasoline bootlegging outfit last year.”
Philip feels an itching deep down in his ear canal. He’s been looking for a way to get out of here for days now. Christ knows what Carmine thinks about him and Ronnie being locked up this long. He probably assumes they’re making a deal to rat on his crew.
Ms. Fusco paces back and forth. “We’d have to see a lot more cooperation out of you if we were going to let you go,” she says. “You might have to think about making some cases on your uncle somewhere down the line.”
“All the more reason you should let me and Ronnie out to see him.”
“You’d be willing to testify against Carmine?”
Whoa. Slow down. He doesn’t want to get himself into anything he can’t get out of. He leans over to whisper in his lawyer’s ear.
“Put the brakes on this bitch before she runs me over.”
“That’s something we can talk about.” Dunning leans back with a bright smile. “Maybe we could start off with Philip feeding you some bits and pieces. See what develops.”
Philip starts to object but then he stops himself. It’s actually a good idea to keep them on the line like that. Greg Scarpa, one of the Colombo guys, strung the FBI along for twenty years that way and never had to testify in open court.
“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Philip says. “You don’t want to blow my cover right away.”
“And what about your cousin?” asks Ms. Fusco. “Will he cooperate?”
Dunning looks at Philip questioningly. He doesn’t know what the fuck is going on. What does he care anyway? He’s getting his measly $40 an hour as a state-appointed lawyer.
“We’ll see,” Philip tells Ms. Fusco. “I’ll have to feel him out.”
She hugs the folder tight to her chest. “I’m going to have to take this up with my supervisors,” she says. “It’s going to be an awkward situation, letting you go so soon after Schiff’s been arrested.”
Philip stares deep into her dark brown eyes, imagining what it would be like to lift her navy attorney skirt, grab her bony shoulders, and have a go at her from behind.
Madonna!
He’d find out if she was a screamer then.
“You’ll figure it out some way,” he says. “I have faith in you.”
50
For almost eight hours, Jake has been locked in the bowels of the system, getting a full doctorate in Advanced Motherfuckery and High Bullshittism.