Hostile Witness (18 page)

My father was a lawnmower man, cutting other people’s grass for a living, surviving without great modesty in a modest house. It was bad enough that my family lived on the cusp of poverty, it was worse that we were Jews living that way, Jews without money. If my father had made a fortune in shoestrings or plastic hangers or potato chips or something maybe I wouldn’t have fought against my ancestry so, but he hadn’t and so I fought. I had wanted to become something new, something glorious, but there was still no estate in Bryn Mawr for me, no BMW, I had not yet been invited to play golf at Merion or tennis on the clean grass courts of the Philadelphia Cricket Club. There was nothing new in what I had become. I was still just a Jew without money. And as I sank into professional failure and a financial despair so deep I had been forced to ask my father, the lawncutter for God’s sake, for a loan, I realized with a growing horror that my failures were sending me spinning back into everything I had sought to escape. And I didn’t need Morris Kapustin sitting in my office reminding me. And I didn’t need Beth staring at me with a pained disappointment in her eyes,
the look a mother gives her son when he behaves badly, not my mother, who never cared enough to be disappointed by me, but someone else’s mother, a kindly loving mother who only thought the best of her child and died a little when she was shown the worst. Who the hell was Beth, as Protestant as Luther, who the hell was Beth to tell me a thing about the curses I felt so keenly? Who the hell was Morris Kapustin, sitting in my office, begging for a job, making me feel lower than a slug? Who the hell needed any of it?

“Just shut up,” I told Beth, even though she hadn’t been saying a thing.

“I was thinking, Victor,” said Morris Kapustin when Beth and I had returned to the office, “now that I know it’s your last name Carl not your first name Carl, that I might know your
mishpocheh.
By any chance was your grandfather Abe Carl?”

“As a matter of fact.”

“The shoe man?”

“He sold shoes.”

“Mine first pair of shoes in this country came right from his store on Marshall Street. What a thing. I was just a
yekl
then, thin as a piece of grass, that thin, Accht, too long ago to even remember. Abe Carl, the shoe man. Later we used to go to
shul
together when he moved out to Logan. In
shul
always he was looking at mine shoes, checking if I needed new ones. ‘You ready for new shoes, Morris,’ he would say. ‘For you I run a special.’ He had a beautiful voice, Abe did.”

“He used to sing me nursery rhymes,” I said. “And Irving Berlin songs.”

“
Erev Shabbos,
singing
L’cha Dodi,
his voice was like an angel’s, only sweeter. Mine first American shoes were good sturdy shoes. You can tell everything about a country by their shoes. Ever wear German shoes?”

“No.”

“You put on one pair of German shoes and you get a whole new understanding of the last hundred years. Believe me. He sold good shoes, your grandfather. Whenever I was needing new shoes it was off to the shoe man for me. You look like him.”

“They say I look like my mother.”

“I see Abe in you. That’s not such a terrible thing. Can you sing?”

“Not a note.”

“Too bad that is. Like an angel’s, only sweeter.”

I thought about it for a moment, thought about my grandfather too, his round peasant face and shock of white hair that I used to muss with my fingers and then call him Albert Einstein, about how it was my grandfather, not my father, who would read me stories and take me to the ball games at old Connie Mack Stadium, thought about it all and then reached into my desk drawer. I handed Morris Kapustin a thick file filled with all the information I had about Frederick Stocker, including press clippings about his trust fund swindle and flight from authorities.

“Stocker. Stocker,” said Kapustin, as if he were chewing on a piece of gristle. “Stocker. I know that name Stocker. How do I know that name? Morris, Morris, think. This Stocker, he stole trust funds?”

“That’s right,” I said.

“Accht, of course. Stocker. Herman Hoff, a wholesaler, watches and such, gave this very man Stocker money to invest and then it was gone, poof, just like the wind. I’ve heard of this Stocker. Herman is not a rich man, nothing like our friend Benny, what this man Stocker took was Herman’s retirement in Boca. You been to Boca, Victor?”

“No.”

“That’s where they go now, Boca. Who needs to
shvitz
so much, I say, still that’s where they go. But not Herman,
he still sells his watches. Seventy-three already, still selling. He wanted to go to Boca.”

With his glasses back on, he began looking through the file, asking me questions I couldn’t answer.

“All I know is what’s in the file,” I said.

“Anything about this man’s hobbies, his relatives, his friends, where he grew up. It is these things, I’ve found, it’s good to know about.”

“He lived in Gladwyne,” I said.

“I’ll ask around. I have mine contacts there.”

“Really?”

He looked at me strangely from under his brow and for an instant his smile disappeared and there was something fierce about this little man. “I think you have no faith,” he said to me.

“What do you mean?”

“No faith that Morris Kapustin will find this man. For what he did to Herman Hoff, not to mention Benny, he deserves to be found. He’s a crook, a
gonif,
finding him will be a
shtik naches.
You think this is a hobby, this finding people. I didn’t start this line with jewelry. But this too needs doing. Talmudic justice. It is mine mission. You study Talmud, Victor?”

“No.”

“So now I know why you have no faith. Somehow, I don’t know how, but somehow we will find that too. But first we find this crook Stocker, agreed?” He smiled warmly and was back to being jolly Morris Kapustin. He took out a bundle of pages and looked through them quickly. “What was this Windward Enterprises thing you have so much papers about?” he asked.

“That was Stocker’s own stab at real estate syndication. It didn’t take and a lot of people lost money.”

“Windward is a funny name for such a business.”

“I hadn’t thought about it,” I said.

“Maybe he was a sailor of some sort,” said Beth.

“This one,” he said wagging a finger at Beth, “this one has
sechel.
Are you married, by any chance?”

“No, I’m not,” said Beth.

He turned to her and his face brightened with interest. “Are you perhaps Jewish?”

“No, I’m sorry, Mr. Kapustin. But I do eat kasha at the deli.”

“That’s something at least. Accht, too bad. Not for you, of course, but…” He sighed deeply and wearily. “You see, I have a son. He’s in the business with me.” His shoulders dropped from the burden. “What could I do, he needed a job.” He waved his hand. “So what for am I
hocking
your
tchynik?
This sailor thing is a good possibility. He might have run off with a boat. Generally they run off with a woman and not their wives most often you wouldn’t believe. But with sailors, they sometimes run off with a boat. Me, I never understood that one inch.”

“There are not many Jewish sailors,” I said.

“You may be right, but the amount of Jews who think they are sailors, don’t even try to count that high, you give your brain a hernia. What time do you have on your watch, Victor?”

“Ten forty-seven,” I said,

He put his watch to his ear. “It’s stopping again. I have to leave, quickly, one more appointment for this day.” He pushed himself out of the chair. “Kramer. A set of earrings is missing, gone. It’s only him and his wife, so where are the earrings? You tell me, I don’t know myself. But I know Mrs. Kramer, she doesn’t clean. Even with her first husband, Kimmelman, and he wasn’t a jeweler, he had a small grocery with no money anywhere and still she wouldn’t clean. So who cleaned the earrings? That I must know.”

“We have a deadline in this case, Mr. Kapustin.” I said.

“Always complications. So how much time do you have? Six months?”

“Three weeks.”

“Three weeks, Victor, I can’t find the toilet in three weeks.”

“Three weeks, Mr. Kapustin.”

“Call me Morris. Okay, three weeks. But don’t now be expecting miracles.
Vos vet sein, vet sein.
I’ll start first thing Sunday morning doing the search.”

“What about tomorrow?”

“On the Shabbos, Victor? Never a shoe did your grandfather sell, Victor, on the Shabbos, that you know. But I should be working on the Shabbos? You’re insulting me now.”

“Okay,” I said. “First thing Sunday morning.”

“By the way, Victor. I didn’t want to mention it but now that we’re friends, that eye of yours. What happened,
nu
?”

“A little accident.”

“You know, a slice of gefilte, not too thin, from the refrigerator with the jelly. It works nice.”

“Thank you, I’ll try it,” I said, without the slightest intention of putting a slice of gefilte fish on my face.

He pointed a stubby finger at me. “You won’t listen to me, I know, Victor, I can see it. What does an old fat man know about anything, you think. Put some gefilte in mine eye and I look like a fool, you think. But why you should be caring so much how you look is beyond me, Victor. Be your own man. For sixty-six years such has been my secret. So I’m not wearing the newest fashions. Thin ties, wide ties, Victor, I wear mine ties and that has always been good enough. So the gefilte, you try it, you’ll see.”

I looked at Morris as he prepared to leave, gathering the papers into a messy pile and shoving it all into the file, grabbing his coat with both arms. A short sloppy Jew who wasn’t embarrassed to be a short sloppy Jew. I would try the slice of gefilte fish on my eye. I’d buy a bottle at the
deli. Who knew? And suddenly I didn’t like the fact that I was being told what to do by Prescott and Moore and Chuckie and the demonic Mr. Rogers, that I was being played like a puppet as I reached for what was being dangled. How was it that someone like Morris Kapustin could be his own man but that it was impossible for me? Fuck them all. Rogers had told me that I was in the middle of something that I couldn’t understand and I didn’t like that one bit. And Chuckie had told me I was already as good as wasted and I didn’t like that one bit either. So maybe I’d check out some of the things I had been told by Prescott and Moore, just to be sure. So maybe I wouldn’t float safely through this cold and rainy fall, maybe I’d fight the current and lift up my head to look around and figure out some things.

“Before you go, Mr. Kapustin,” I said.

He turned. “Such respect I can’t take, it makes me want to dress better and who needs so many suits. Call me Morris.”

“All right, Morris.” I reached into my top drawer and took out the chip with the wild boar’s head on it that I had snatched from Bissonette’s love chest. “Have you ever seen anything like this before?”

Morris dropped his coat on a chair, stepped up to my desk, and took the chip. He put on his glasses and examined it carefully in his small, fat hands. “This is a casino chip, like in Atlantic City, but with no name and this picture. This is a very strange thing here. Every other chip like this I’ve seen, it had the casino name on it. That’s so you know where to take back your money, what little money you have left. And still they line up for the buses. Who can explain that to me? And Rosalie now has started. She plays blacktop. I would forbid it, absolutely forbid it, except that she brings home more than she takes.”

“Could you try to find out what it is?”

“I could. Is this something to do with Mr. Stocker, the thief?”

“No, it’s a different case.”

“A different case?” He lifted his head and gave me a flash of genuine smile. “So, I think maybe you gained a little faith today, Victor. A little faith in Morris Kapustin. No?”

I WAS SLEEPING,
or trying to in any event, feeling a painful pressure on my eye as I burrowed my head into my pillows, the tangy sweet smell of gefilte fish still clinging to my skin, when the buzzer rang. I groped for the clock radio and read the blue-green fluorescent numbers: 2:38. In a heartbeat I jerked awake, remembering that I had been twice threatened with serious harm only a few nights before. I imagined a horde of drug dealing thugs outside my apartment ready to rip out my spleen and decided not to answer the buzzer, but it rang again and then again and so I dared a look out my window. The street was empty and wet, glazed with a heavy rain. I lived in a brownstone converted long ago to apartments and there was no intercom between the small vestibule, where the mailboxes and buzzers were, and my apartment. The only way to know who was buzzing was to go downstairs and see. I pulled on a pair of jeans that had been lying on my floor and carefully, like a cat burglar, slipped down the steps of my own building to get a look at my late-night visitor through the inside vestibule door.

Veronica Ashland.

She was wearing a tan raincoat and jeans, her brown hair falling flatly in damp strands. The mascara under her eyes was thick from the rain, or was it tears, I couldn’t tell just then, but her eyes were red and her lips thick, as if she had been crying. I searched the vestibule behind her. She
was alone. Without opening the door I shouted, “What are you doing here?”

She said something from the other side, I could see her lips move, but I couldn’t hear what she was saying through the glass and wood door.

“Speak louder,” I said.

Her lips moved more emphatically, but still I couldn’t hear her. She made a motion for me to open the door. I wondered if she was merely moving her lips, pretending to speak in order to trick me into letting her in.

“What do you want?”

She made the same motion. With another nervous glance over her shoulder into the shadowy emptiness of the vestibule, I opened the door.

“Victor, what’s the matter?” she said as she stepped into the lobby. I quickly closed the door. She dripped onto the thin blue rug. “You looked as if you were going to turn me away like I was a Jehovah’s Witness trying to convert you.”

“What do you want?”

“I couldn’t sleep.”

“Well, I was sleeping fine.”

“Don’t be such a grouch. Let me upstairs so I can take off this raincoat and dry out some.”

“I don’t think I should.”

“Oh, Victor, you’re such a Puritan. I’m sure I’ll be safe.”

She leaned forward to kiss me. I didn’t pull back, she was too beautiful to pull back from, but I didn’t return her kiss, either, so it was like she was kissing a statue, a statue nearly pissing his pants in fear.

“Who’s Mr. Rogers?” I asked after she had stopped kissing me and backed away with disappointment creasing her face.

“Mr. Rogers?”

“Very thin black man, elegantly dressed, droopy eyes. A drug seller, I think.”

“Oh, you mean Norvel Goodwin. Do you know Norvel too?”

“Is that his real name?” I said. “Well, your Norvel Goodwin took me for a ride Thursday night in the councilman’s limo. He told me to stay away from you. That if I didn’t he would hurt me. Then he had his goon give me this black eye.”

“Oh dear.” She touched the swelling lightly with her fingertips.

“Who is he?” I asked.

“Just an old friend. I guess he’s jealous.”

“Of me?”

“Why not?”

“There was more than jealousy,” I said. “There’s something going on between him and Jimmy.”

“Norvel and Jimmy hate each other, they have ever since the thing with Jimmy’s daughter. Jimmy almost killed him once.”

“He said there were things going on with you and this case that I didn’t understand. Do you know anything about that?”

“Norvel’s a little crazy with conspiracies. Ask him who killed Malcolm X sometime.”

“Who does he say?”

“Are you going to let me up?” she asked.

“What are you really doing here?”

“The Greek left me another dead animal. A bird this time, a dove, pretty white feathers. Its neck was snapped.”

“Jesus.”

“Please.”

I stared at her lovely face for a moment and decided that she had been crying. “Follow me,” I said as I turned to go up the stairs.

On the way up I asked, “Would this Norvel Goodwin hurt me like he said?”

“No, he’s not like that.”

And then a few steps later, “Well, maybe.”

And as soon as I opened the door, “Yes, he would.”

I took her coat and hung it over a chair. She was wearing tennis shoes, jeans, and a sweatshirt, but even in her athletic wear, and even with the damage done to her makeup by the tears, she was too beautiful. “Can I use your bathroom?” she asked, and I showed her where it was.

While she was in the bathroom I improvised a quick cleanup, tossing waxed cheese steak wrappers, stained maroon with dried ketchup, into the trash can and grabbing all the loose clothes I could get hold of to dump into the washing machine. My apartment came with a little washer-dryer unit off the kitchen and I generally used the washer as a hamper, running the machine only when it was too full to jam in more clothes, and the dryer as a closet, pulling out what I needed day by day. It was a pretty good system, generally the dryer emptied by the time the washer was full, and it saved all the needless folding and putting away of normal laundry. Of course my T-shirts had a pinkish sheen from being washed with my red shorts and everything was creased, but that was my trademark anyway, creases. There was no hope for the bathroom, the gray grunge in the toilet bowl, the slivers of hair caked on the sink as if with glue, but judging from the condition of her bathroom I didn’t think she’d mind. In any event, I figured, who the hell was she to judge my apartment when she barged in unannounced at 2:38 in the morning.

When she came out of the bathroom all the makeup had been wiped off her face and she looked like a girl in an Ivory Soap commercial, gleaming with health.

“Do you have a drink?” she said. “I could use a drink.”

“I might have a beer.”

“That would be great,” she said. “I’ll get it.”

“Isn’t it a little late?” but she was already out of the living room into the kitchen. I could hear her opening my
refrigerator, imagine her peering into it as if the mysteries of the universe were growing there, which they might have been for how often I cleaned it.

“How old is this milk?” she asked from the kitchen.

“I don’t know, pretty old, I’d guess.”

“Old enough so that the ice from the refrigeration cables has grown around it, locking it in place,” she said. “What’s gefilte fish?”

“It’s medicinal,” I said.

“Do you want something?”

“No. I’m fine,” I said.

She came back into the living room, twisting off the top of a Rolling Rock. She sat down on the couch beside me with her legs curled beneath her and took a long drink.

“Thank you,” she said. “I didn’t know where to go when I saw that bird just lying there with its head like that.” She shuddered. “On my doorstep. I had to get away.”

“What are you going to do?”

“Get someone to clean it up.”

“Not me,” I said. “I’m out of the dead animal disposal business.”

“Maybe I’ll call Henry on the car phone tomorrow. He’ll do it. He takes care of me when he can.”

“He took care of me, too.”

“I’m so sorry about your eye.”

She sort of shuffled on her knees toward me and touched the eye gently with her fingertips and then harder, hard enough to make me wince and pull away. “Does it hurt much?” she asked.

“Only when you press it.”

She stroked around my eye lightly with the back of her hand, soothing the nerves, and then pressed it hard again.

“Like that,” I said. “Stop it.”

“When Henry came back for us with the limousine we knew you had vomited. Henry had tried to clean it up, and all the windows were open, but it still smelled like hell.
The councilman was livid for a moment and then he laughed and laughed. He told Chester, ‘Not only does your lawyer cry, but he drinks like a teenybopper.’ Jimmy and Chuckie thought that was funny as hell. Chester told them both to shut up.”

“It wasn’t the drinking,” I said. “It was the sock in my eye.”

“Now you’re being defensive.”

“I’m a good drinker.”

“Of course you are,” she said sweetly.

“I could drink both those bastards under the table.”

“Of course you could.”

“You don’t think so?”

“No,” she said. “What are we going to do about my landlord?”

“Get your friend Norvel to threaten him.”

“He’s not a friend anymore.”

She was leaning over me now, still looking at my eye, searching the black and blue as if she were searching tea leaves for hidden meanings. With her makeup off, in her sweatshirt and jeans, there was something innocently collegiate about her.

“Tell me, Veronica,” I asked. “What are you doing with these guys, Jimmy Moore and Norvel Goodwin?”

“It’s a long story. Very sad.”

“Tell me.”

“It started with a boy, a very sweet boy. He’s dead now but that’s how it started.” I thought I saw something in her eye, but I must have imagined it because as I kept looking at her it disappeared. “I’ll tell you sometime,” she said. “Just not now, please. What am I going to do tonight?”

“I’ll call you a cab.”

“I can’t go home with that dead bird on my doorstep. I just can’t.”

With a gallant shrug I stood up. “All right,” I said. “I’ll
take you home and clean up the bird. But this is the last time.”

“Can’t I stay here?” she asked.

“No. And tomorrow I’ll file for a restraining order. Restraining orders are generally useless, but at least it will be something. I’ll let you know when the court sets up the hearing.”

“Can’t I stay the night on your sofa?”

“No,” I said. “Definitely not.”

I walked to the closet and was reaching for my raincoat when she came from behind and placed her arms around me. Her hands lightly rubbed up and down my chest. “Can’t I stay, please? I wouldn’t sleep knowing that bird was there, and even if you threw it down the chute I’d still see it lying there, its sad little neck bent like it is, a small dribble of blood out its beak.”

Without turning around, with her hands still floating across my chest, I said, “I really can’t.”

“It’s Norvel, isn’t it?”

“It’s everything.”

“I won’t let him hurt you.”

I pulled her arms away and turned around. “I can’t,” I said, but it came out more like “Ay kaaugh” because she had slipped her tongue into my mouth. I tasted the sexy beeriness of her breath and smelled the wetness of her hair and there was something silky and warm about the way she pressed her body into mine and though I said, “Ay ayeaally kaaugh,” I knew that I would.

Jeanne, my first lover, a funny word to use for a sixteen-year-old girl with braces, was an athlete, a distance swimmer, all shoulders and thighs, trained for long, exhausting efforts that left her shaking with weariness. I was a notable disappointment to her and we both ended up more bemused than satisfied. My experiences with Michelle
were more satisfactory, she had patience and clever hands and a willingness to experiment that was just right for a beginner. Sandra was tall and cold and endured sex but I was fascinated by her blondness, white white hair, pale skin, a profound phlegmaticness. Rebecca was a virgin, but eager, and let me play the role of experienced older man, though she was only a year behind me in college. “Let’s try this,” I would say, nervously, and she’d always reply with a cheerful, “Sure.” Allyn was in love with me, which brought to the table an intensity I found uncomfortable. Sue was blonde and plump and from Wisconsin but still sweetly kinked, with a thing about her feet. And of course my ex-fiancée Julie, the one true love of my youth, earnest and sad, loosing tears when we orgasmed together with silent sighs under her down comforter. Along the way there were Tina and Bonnie and Lauren, who laughed and grabbed and shouted in French. There was a dancer, a cop, a divorced woman from Toledo with a son older than me. There were many many delightful women, every shape, every size, every political party including the Communists, and I screwed them all. Maybe I was no Wilt Chamberlain, but I was no wilting violet either and I had made love to a peck of women in my life. But I had never made love to a woman like Veronica Ashland.

When we were naked, on my unmade bed, rubbing our hands uncontrollably over each other’s bodies, she opened the foil packet she found in my drawer, the packet I had stolen from Bissonette’s love chest, and popped the condom in her mouth, placing it upon me with her teeth, leaving just the right amount of slack at the tip. Then, like a crazed leopard, she was on top of me, pressing the palm of her hand into my swollen eye, biting my neck, my breast, licking my chest and my ear, pressing my eye and biting so hard I screamed as she worked. She had a thin supple body that responded to everything like a dream, her breasts were small and sharp and prickly hot, entering her was like
entering a jar of electric honey, that sweet, that wild. She bent forward and arched back and bent forward like a willow stick, grabbing my hair painfully hard along the way as she sucked a kiss from my throat. She came quickly and ferociously and best of all she came again, and again. I knew it was her, not me, and I struggled to keep up but she was always one moment ahead of me. I moaned my orgasm and she howled, snatching at the air like a lioness and then the willow bent back toward me and she buried her face in my neck and meowed. She sounded like a satisfied house cat, stretched around a newly emptied bowl of milk.

The sound involuntarily brought up a question. “There was a litter box in your apartment.”

“Yes,” she said.

“But no cat,” I said. “That was your cat the Greek killed, wasn’t it?”

“Yes, it was.”

“But you acted like you didn’t care about the cat, just the mess.”

“It was only a cat,” she said with a dismissive laugh.

“But I know about women and their cats, they are like babies to them, their children. A cat gets a hairball, they grow frantic. But you let me drop the corpse of your cat into a Strawbridge bag and dump it down the chute without a tear.”