Bitter Truth (2 page)

“What can I do for you?” I asked.

She looked around. “Can we, like, talk somewhere?”

“You can walk me to the subway,” I said as I headed south to Market Street. I wasn’t all that interested in what she had to say. From the look of her I had her figured. She had fished my name out of the Yellow Pages and found I was a criminal attorney and wanted me now to help get her boyfriend out of the stir. Of course he was innocent and wrongfully convicted and of course the trial had been a sham and of course she couldn’t pay me right off but if I could only help out from the goodness of my heart she would promise to pay me later. About once a week I got just such a call from a desperate relative or girlfriend trolling for lawyers through the phone book. And what I told each of them I would end up telling her: that nobody does anything from the goodness of his heart and I was no different.

She watched me go and then ran to catch up, doing a hop skip in her platform shoes to keep pace with my stride. “I need your help, Mr. Carl.”

“My docket’s full right now.”

“I’m in serious trouble.”

“All my clients are in serious trouble.”

“But I’m not like all your clients.”

“That’s right, my clients have all paid me a retainer for my services. They have bought my loyalty and attention with their cash. Will you be able to pay me a retainer, Ms….?”

“Shaw. Caroline Shaw. How much?”

“Five thousand for a routine criminal matter.”

“This is not routine, I am certain.”

“Well in that case it might be more.”

“I can pay,” she said. “That’s not a problem.”

I stopped at that. I was expecting an excuse, a promise, a plea, I was not expecting to hear that payment was not a problem. I stopped and turned and took a closer look. Even though she dressed like a waif she held herself regally, her shoulders back, her head high, which was a trick, really, in those ridiculous platform shoes. The eyes within those raccoon bands of mascara were blue and sharply in focus, the eyes of a law student or an accomplished liar. And she spoke better then I would have expected from the outfit. “What do you want me to do for you, Ms. Shaw?”

“I want you to find out who killed my sister.”

That was new. I tilted my head. “I thought you said
you
were in trouble?”

“I think I might be next.”

“Well that is a problem, and I wish you well. But you should be going to the police. It’s their job to investigate murders and protect citizens, my job is to get the murderers off. Good day, Ms. Shaw,” I said as I turned and started again to walk south to the subway.

“I told you I’d be willing to pay,” she said as she skipped and hopped again to stay with me, her shoes clopping on the cement walk. “Doesn’t that matter?”

“That matters a heap,” I said as I kept walking, “but signing a check is one thing, having the check clear is entirely another.”

“But it will,” she said. “And I need your help. I’m scared.”

“Go to the police.”

“So you’re not going to help me?” Her voice had turned pathetic and after it came out she stopped walking beside me. It wasn’t tough to keep going, no tougher than passing a homeless beggar without dropping a quarter in her cup. We learn to just walk on in the city, but even as I walked on I could still hear her. “I don’t know what I’m going to do if you don’t help me. I think whoever killed her is going to kill me next. I’m desperate, Mr. Carl. I carry this but I’m still scared all the time.”

I stopped again and, with a feeling of dread, I turned around. She was holding an automatic pistol pointed at my heart.

“Won’t you help me, Mr. Carl? Please? You don’t know how desperate I am.”

The gun had a black dull finish, rakish lines, it was small-bore, sure, but its bore was still large enough to kill a generation’s best hope in a hotel ballroom, not to mention a small-time criminal attorney who was nobody’s best hope for anything.

I’ll say this for her, she knew how to grab my attention.

3

P
UT THE GUN AWAY,” I said in my sharpest voice.

“I didn’t mean, oh God no, I…” Her hand wavered and the barrel drooped as if the gun had gone limp.

“Put the gun away,” I said again, and it wasn’t as brave as it sounds because the only other options were to run, exposing my back to the .22 slug, or pissing my pants, which no matter how intense the immediate relief makes really an awful mess. And after I told her to put the gun away, told her twice for emphasis, she did just as I said, stuck it right back in her handbag, all of which was unbelievably gratifying for me in a superhero sort of way.

Until she started crying.

“Oh no, now don’t do that,” I said, “no no don’t no.”

I stepped toward her as she collapsed in a sitting position to the sidewalk, crying, the thick mascara around her eyes running in lines down her cheek, her nose reddening. She wiped her face with a black leather sleeve, smearing everything.

“Don’t cry, please please, it will be all right. We’ll go somewhere, we’ll talk, just please please stop crying, please.”

I couldn’t leave her there after that, sitting on the ground like she was, crying black tears that splattered on the cement. In a different era I would have offered to buy her a good stiff drink, but this wasn’t a different era, so what I offered to buy her instead was a cappuccino. She let me drag her to a coffee shop a few blocks east. It was a beat little place with old stuffed couches and chairs, a few rickety tables, its back walls filled with shelves of musty used paperbacks. I was drinking a black coffee, decaf actually, since the sight of her gun aimed at my heart had given me enough of a start for the morning. Caroline was sitting across from me at one of the tables, her arms crossed, in front of her the cappuccino, pale, frothy, sprinkled with cinnamon, and completely untouched. Her eyes now were red and smeared and sad. There were a few others in the joint, young and mangy in their slacker outfits, greasy hair and flannel shirts, sandals. Caroline looked right at home. In my blue suit I felt like a narc.

“Do you have a license for that gun?” I asked.

“I suppose I need one, don’t I?”

I nodded and took a sip from my mug. “Take some sound legal advice and throw the gun away. I should turn you in, actually, for your own good, though I won’t. It goes against my…”

“You don’t mind if I smoke, do you?” she said, interrupting me mid-sentence, and before I could answer she was already rummaging again in that little black handbag. I must admit I didn’t like seeing her hand back inside that bag, but all she brought out this time was a pack of Camel Lights. She managed to light her cigarette with her arms still crossed.

I looked her over again and guessed to myself that she was a clerk in a video store, or a part-time student at Philadelphia Community College, or maybe both. “What is it you do, Caroline?”

“I’m between things at the moment,” she said, leaning forward, looking for something on the table. Finding nothing, she tossed her spent match atop the brown sprinkled foam of her cappuccino. I had just spent $2.50 for her liquid ashtray. I assumed she would have preferred the drink. “Last month I was a photographer. Next month maybe I’ll take up tap dancing.”

“An unwavering commitment to caprice, I see.”

She laughed a laugh so full of rue I felt like I was watching Betty Davis tilt her head back, stretch her white neck. “Exactly. I aspire to live my life like a character in a sitcom, every week a new and perky adventure.”

“What’s the title of this episode?”

“
Into the Maw,
or maybe
Into the Mall,
because after this I need to go to the Gallery and buy some tampons. Why were you in that stupid little courtroom this morning?”

I took another sip of coffee. “One of my clients attempted to buy one hundred and seventy-nine automatic rifles, three grenade launchers, and a flamethrower from an undercover cop.”

“Is he in the mob, this client of yours?”

“There is no mob. It is a figment of the press’s imagination.”

“Then what was he going to do with all those guns?”

“That’s the question, isn’t it?”

“I had heard you were a mob lawyer. It’s true, isn’t it?”

I made an effort to stare at her without blinking as I let the comment slide off me like a glob of phlegm.

Yes, a majority of my clients just happened to be junior associates of Mr. Raffaello, like I said, but I was no house counsel, no mob lawyer. At least not technically. I merely handled their cases after they allegedly committed their alleged crimes, nothing more. And though my clients never flipped, never ratted out the organization that fed them since they were pups, that sustained them, that took care of their families and their futures, though my clients never informed on the family, the decision not to inform was made well before they ever stepped into my office. And was I really representing these men, or was I instead enforcing the promises made to all citizens in the Constitution of the United States? Wasn’t I among the noblest defenders of those sacred rights for which our forefathers fought and died? Who among us was doing more to protect liberty, to ensure justice? Who among us was doing more to safeguard the American way of life?

Do I sound defensive?

I was about to explain it all to her but it bored even me by then so all I said was, “I do criminal law. I don’t get involved in…”

“What’s that?” she shouted as she leaped to kneeling on her seat. “What is it? What?”

I stared for a moment into her anxious face, filled with a true terror, before I looked under the table at where her legs had been only an instant before. A cat, brown and ruffled, was rubbing its back on the legs of her chair. It looked quite contented as it rubbed.

“It’s just a cat,” I said.

“Get rid of it.”

“It’s just a cat,” I repeated.

“I hate them, miserable ungrateful little manipulators, with their claws and their teeth and their fur-licking tongues. They eat human flesh, do you know that? It’s one of their favorite things. Faint near a cat and it’ll chew your face off.”

“I don’t think so.”

“Get rid of it, please please please.”

I reached under the table and the cat scurried away from my grasp. I stood up and went after it, herding it to the back of the coffee shop where, behind the bookshelves, was an open bathroom door. When the cat slipped into the bathroom I closed the door behind it.

“What was that all about?” I asked Caroline when I returned to the table.

“I don’t like cats,” she said as she fiddled with her cigarette.

“I don’t especially like cats either, but I don’t jump on my seat and go ballistic when I see one.”

“I have a little problem with them, that’s all.”

“With cats?”

“I’m afraid of cats. I’m not the only one. It has a name. Ailurophobia. So what? We’re all afraid of something.”

I thought on that a bit. She was right of course, we were all afraid of something, and in the scheme of things being afraid of cats was not the worst of fears. My great fear in this life didn’t have a name that I knew of. I was afraid of remaining exactly who I was, and that phobia instilled a shiver of fear into every one of my days. Something as simple as a fear of cats would have been a blessing.

“All right, Caroline,” I said. “Tell me about your sister.”

She took a drag from her cigarette and exhaled in a long white stream. “Well, for one thing, she was murdered.”

“Have the police found the killer?”

She reached for her pack of Camel Lights even though the cigarette she had was still lit. “Jackie was hanging from the end of a rope in her apartment. They’ve concluded that she hung herself.”

“The police said that?”

“That’s right. The coroner and some troglodyte detective named McDeiss. They closed the case, said it was a suicide. But she didn’t.”

“Hang herself?”

“She wouldn’t.”

“Detective McDeiss ruled it a suicide?”

She sighed. “You don’t believe me either.”

“No, actually,” I said. “I’ve had a few run-ins with McDeiss but he’s a pretty good cop. If he said it was a suicide, it’s a fair bet your sister killed herself. You may not have thought she was suicidal, that’s perfectly natural, but…”

“Of course she was suicidal,” she said, interrupting me once again. “Jackie read Sylvia Plath as if her poetry were some sort of a road map through adolescence. One of her favorite lines was from a poem called ‘Lady Lazarus.’ ‘Dying is an art, like everything else. I do it exceptionally well.’ ”

“Then I don’t understand your problem.”

“Jackie talked of suicide as naturally as others talked of the weather, but she said she’d never hang herself. She was disgusted by the idea of dangling there, aware of the pain, turning as the rope tightened and creaked, the pressure on your neck, on your backbone, hanging there until they cut you down.”

“What would have been her way?”

“Pills. Darvon. Two thousand milligrams is fatal. She always had six thousand on hand. Jackie used to joke that she wanted to be prepared if ever a really terrific suicidal urge came along. Besides, in her last couple years she almost seemed happy. It was like she was actually finding the peacefulness she once thought was only for her in death through this New Age church she had joined, finding it through meditation. She had even gotten herself engaged, to an idiot, yes, but still engaged.”

“So let’s say she was murdered. What do you want me to do about it?”

“Find out who did it.”

“I’m just a lawyer,” I said. “What you’re looking for is a private investigator. Now I have one that I use who is terrific. His name is Morris Kapustin and he’s a bit unorthodox, but if anyone can help he can. I can set…”

“I don’t want him, I want you.”

“Why me?”

“What exactly do mob lawyers do, anyway, eat in Italian restaurants and plot?”

“Why me, Caroline?” I stared at her and waited.

She lit her new cigarette from the still-glowing butt of her old one and then crushed the old against the edge of the mug. “Do you think I smoke too much? Everybody thinks I smoke too much. I used to be cool, now it’s like I’m a leper. Old ladies stop me in the street and lecture.”

I just stared at her and waited some more and after all the waiting she took a deep drag from her cigarette, exhaled, and said:

“I think a bookie named Jimmy Vigs killed her.”

So that was it, why she had chased me, insignificant me, down the street and pulled a gun and collapsed to the cement in black tears, all of which was perfectly designed to gain my attention, if not my sympathy. I knew Jimmy Vigs Dubinsky, sure I did. I had represented him on his last bookmaking charge and gotten him an acquittal too, when I denied he was a gambler, denied it was his ledger that the cops had found, denied it was his handwriting in the ledger despite what the experts said because wink-wink what do experts know, denied the notes in the ledger referred to bets on football games, denied the units mentioned in the ledger notes referred to dollar amounts, and then, after all those sweet denials, I had opened my arms and said with my best boys-will-be-boys voice, “And where’s the harm?” It helped that the jury was all men, after I had booted all the women, and that the trial was held in the spring, smack in the middle of March madness, when every one of those men had money in an NCAA pool. So, yes, I knew Jimmy Vigs Dubinsky.

“He’s a sometime client, as you obviously know,” I said, “so I really don’t want to hear anymore. But what I can tell you about Jim Dubinsky is that he’s not a killer. I’ve known him for…”

“Then you can clear him.”

“Will you stop interrupting me? It’s rude and annoying.”

She tilted her head at me and smiled, as if provoking me was her intent.

“I don’t need to clear Jimmy,” I said. “He’s not a suspect since the cops ruled your sister’s death a suicide.”

“I suspect him and I have a gun.”

I pursed my lips. “And you’ll kill him if I don’t take the case, is that it?”

“I’m a desperate woman, Mr. Carl,” she said, and there was just the right touch of husky fear in her voice, as if she had prepared the line in advance, repeated it to the mirror over and over until she got it just right.

“Let me guess, just a wild hunch of mine, but before you started playing around with f-stops and film speeds, did you happen to take a stab at acting?”

She smiled. “For a few years, yes. I was actually starring in a film until the financing was pulled.”

“And that point the gun, ‘Oh-my-God,’ collapse into a sobbing heap on the sidewalk thing, that was just part of an act?”

Her smile broadened and there was something sly and inviting in it. “I need your help.”

“You made the right decision giving up on the dramatics.” I thought for a moment that it might be entertaining to see her go up against Jimmy Vigs with her pop gun, but then thought better of it. And I did like that smile of hers, at least enough to listen. “All right, Caroline, tell me why you think my friend Jimmy killed your sister.”

She sighed and inhaled and sprayed a cloud of smoke into the air above my face. “It’s my brother Eddie,” she said. “He has a gambling problem. He bets too much and he loses too often. From what I understand, he is into this Jimmy Vigs person for a lot of money, too much money. There were threatening calls, there were late-night visits, Eddie’s car was vandalized. One of Eddie’s arms was broken, in a fall, he said, but no one believed him. Then Jackie died, in what seemed like a suicide but which I know wasn’t, and suddenly the threats stopped, the visits were finished, and Eddie’s repaired and repainted car maintained its pristine condition. The bookie must have been paid off. If this Jimmy Vigs person had killed Eddie he would have lost everything, but he killed Jackie and that must have scared Eddie into digging up the money and paying. But I heard he’s betting again, raising his debt even farther. And if your Jimmy Vigs needs to scare Eddie again I’m the one he’ll go after next.”

I listened to her, nodding all the while, not believing a word of it. If Jimmy was stiffed he’d threaten, sure, who wouldn’t, and maybe break a leg or two, which could be quite painful when done correctly, but that was as far as it would go. Unless, maybe, we were talking big big bucks, but it didn’t seem likely that Jim would let it get that high with someone like this girl’s brother.