Hostile Witness (24 page)

“Drugs?” I asked.

“Yes, that was Saffron at the start, big spliffs of hash in the rock clubs in Amsterdam, than later cocaine in Florence and Greece. I didn’t join in at first, but as we continued, the trip seemed more and more dreamlike. Drugs just seemed to fit in.”

“That was pretty stupid for an American.”

“Yes, but after a while we seemed to have stripped away our nationalities, we were just travelers. It was no longer the goal of India propelling us forward, it was just the urge to move, to see more, to go ever further on. Then in Iran, on the way to Pakistan, we had the accident.”

They had tried to catch the bus from Teheran but it was full, and the next day’s was full too. They didn’t know when there would be an opening, but at the bus station there was a man, black silk shirt, gap-toothed smile. He sidled up and said he was going to the border and would take them for a small fee, less than the bus, only 2,000 toman. The next thing they knew they were in the back seat of a battered blue Mercedes van, sitting on stiff seats with no padding, the van filled with women in black chador holding babies, unshaven men sweating in their grimy shirts, two handsome young men drinking orange Schwepps. With the top of the van piled high with luggage they barreled down the hills outside Teheran, past signs with warnings of falling rocks, into the salt desert on the
ancient silk road into Pakistan. They discovered shortly into the trip that the other travelers were being smuggled out of the country, dissidents, young men trying to skip the army service, and the surreptitious nature of the journey thrilled Saffron no end. In a late evening rest stop just outside Isfahan they had drunk some bad water and now Saffron was throwing up, to the amusement of the other passengers, sticking his head out a window, banging his cheek on the frame, heaving loudly, the van shaking like a carnival ride. At a narrow switchback just through one of the tunnels south of Isfahan on the way to Shiraz, the driver barely braked as he swung wildly around, descending into the darkness, the van tilting over the hill as it rushed into the turn. A truck coming up the other way blared its horn and the driver swerved right, the wheels slipped off the road, and, like a gymnast in slow motion, the van tumbled down, down the slope, falling down until it broke apart on a rocky desert ledge.

Veronica had been fine, a bruised shoulder, a sprained wrist, but Saffron, sitting beside the window, had been a mess. In the Shiraz hospital where they had been taken, the doctors set his broken arm and stitched up the gashes in his face, but the real problem was his back, a compression fracture of three vertebrae, which Saffron was adamant about not letting the Iranian doctors set. Instead he gritted his teeth through the pain and, once released, took the next bus out, a modern bus with padded seats and shock absorbers and a bathroom in the back. By the time they reached Pakistan, Saffron was delirious with pain, crying out for drugs, limping alone into the first market he could find and bringing back a reddish gray powder, a local herb, he said, which he snorted first and then mixed with tobacco and smoked and which seemed to give him some measure of blessed relief. She tried it too, mixed with the tobacco of a cigarette.

“It was sweet, numbing, terrific really,” she said. “Later
I found out it was heroin, but I didn’t know at first and when I found out it was too late.”

“You really didn’t know?”

“I was from Iowa. Within a week he was shooting up three times a day and I was joining him. Everything after that turned into a nightmare, unreal, smoky, disastrous.”

“Jesus.”

“Untie me, Victor.”

I untied her. Without rubbing her wrists she pulled her arms tight into her torso and turned away from me. I put my hand on her arm to reassure her but she shrugged me off. I didn’t want to hear any more, I wished I had never asked the question about her and Jimmy, wondered how the councilman entered into her story anyway.

“Through Pakistan and India he grew thinner and thinner, he was skinny to begin with, but he turned into a ghost. All night he shook, he sweated, his teeth started falling out. He was feverish. I begged him to come with me to America to get treatment. I told him they would fix his back, get him off the drug, we could live in Iowa, I told him, or New York, but he insisted on reaching the Ganges. His arm got infected, it swelled, it began to stink, he started limping from an abscess in his foot. His fever made him delusional in the nights. He was too weak to carry anything, so I emptied out half my stuff and put his clothes in my pack. He stopped eating anything but fruit, drank only water. He could barely talk when we arrived in Varanasi. We went right to the river and he wrapped himself in a white sheet and stepped down the ghat, slowly, mournfully. He turned and waved at me and then stepped down into the water of the Ganges until he was submerged.

“It was filthy, they were washing clothes, dumping sewage, it smelled like a latrine, shit and foam floated by, just upstream they were dumping ashes from the corpses ceremonially burned on the great pyres by the river. He
was submerged for a long time, too long a time, and then I knew he would die in the river, his final wave was a wave good-bye, and I started running down after him. But he emerged, filthy, the white sheet covered with mud, his face serene, his eyes calm. His fever had broken. When he climbed out of the river he said, ‘Okay, Ronnie. Take me to America.’

“I put him in one of the whitewashed boarding houses they have just off the river and ran to a travel agent. There was just enough left in my account to buy two tickets to Cedar Rapids, Iowa, by way of New York. We would leave the next day. Thrilled, I rushed back to the room and discovered him dead. I found out later that the boarding house was primarily for old men who were coming to Varanasi to die and have their ashes scattered in the river. Before I left I arranged for him to be burned like the others, in his muddy sheet, and to have his ashes shoveled like manure into that fucking Ganges.”

“My God, Veronica.”

“I didn’t wait for the funeral.”

“That is awful.”

She stayed on her side, facing away from me, silent, and I knew enough not to say anything. She lay there for five minutes, for ten. I lay on my back, my head atop my hands, thinking about the skinny dark poet with a name like Saffron entering the river bit by bit until he wasn’t there anymore. Suddenly she flipped over until she was facing me and ran a finger lightly down my side.

“So I cashed in his ticket,” she said. “It was money, you know. I had to change planes in New York and realized the last place I wanted to go was Cedar Rapids, so I stayed. I got a job as a paralegal, hated it, I waited tables, hated it, I worked in a gallery, hated it, I tried modeling, they hated me, so I decided to go back to school. I got into Penn, which is how I ended up in Philadelphia, and how I met Norvel.”

“How did a Penn student meet a drug dealing scum like Norvel Goodwin?”

“I looked for him.”

“I don’t understand.”

“I was still hooked, Victor. Just because Saffron died didn’t mean I was cured. I had a source in New York, but when I ended up at Penn, in West Philadelphia, I just walked into the neighborhood and started asking. He wasn’t hard to find. He liked me right off, this pretty white girl stepping into his place and asking for a fix. We became a thing.”

“What about Jimmy in all this?”

“Well, Norvel had a place in West Philly, about six blocks from campus. It was on Fifty-first Street, a shooting gallery of sorts, but not as bad as some of the places up north. Jimmy had lost his daughter only a few years before and was in full battle cry. A neighborhood group came to him about the house. He raised a mob of concerned citizens and raided the place with clubs and shovels and axes and baseball bats. I was there the night Jimmy smashed his way through the door. You should have seen him, his eyes fired, bashing anything in his way, knocking out windows, busting doors, slamming a television screen with a hatchet. He almost killed Norvel, dragged him out of a closet where Norvel had been hiding and started beating the hell out of him with his fists and then with a chair. Norvel’s a big man, stronger than he looks, but Jimmy beat the hell out of him. And then he torched the place. He later said the drug dealers had set it on fire, but his people had quietly cleared the surrounding houses before they burst in. Two boys died in the fire, lost in a stupor in a hidden attic. They found them later, after the ashes had cooled.”

“What about you?”

“He found me in a daze in a small room on the third floor and gave me to Chester to take to his car. Chester left
me with the driver, who watched over me, made sure I didn’t leave until it was over.”

“Who was that, Henry?”

“No, Henry was inside. He was Norvel’s partner at the time.”

“No.”

“Sure. And after that, after Henry cleaned himself up, Jimmy gave him a job, turned him into one of his models. Everyone Jimmy hires had a problem. That’s so when he gives his speeches he can point with pride to his workers and lecture about how possible it is to change your life.”

“But what about you?”

“After the fire, after the police came and went, after Jimmy had given his speeches for the news reporters in time for the eleven o’clock news, after everything was over, Jimmy came back to his car and took me to a private drug treatment center. He knew by then that I had been Norvel’s girl. At the center they told him they didn’t have any openings but then he started yelling about city council funding and I was admitted that night. I told him I didn’t want it but I really did. I was ready. When I saw that house burn down I knew I was ready. I thought that would be it with Jimmy, but he kept on visiting me, my only visitor, hectoring me to kick my illness, taking me out for ice cream. It may sound strange, since it was more than a year later, but that raid and the fire, that whole night was part of that accident south of Isfahan. It was Jimmy who pulled me from the twisted wreckage of that van. With his help I got clean—he saved my life. By that time, though, school was finished for me, I had incompleted everything. Jimmy got me the apartment in Olde City, he got me a job.”

“And he got in your pants.”

“That was my choice.”

“And if you said no?”

“Believe it or not, if I wanted nothing to do with him I bet he would have done everything the same. When he
pulled me out of that house he didn’t know me from Eve, all he knew was that I was in trouble and needed help.”

“And pretty as hell.”

“Well, maybe yes, but I had been pretty for a long time and in trouble for a long time and only Jimmy stepped up to take care of me.”

“And for that you owe him the occasional roll in the hay.”

“No, Victor. For that I owe him everything.”

“I HAD KNOWN THE COUNCILMAN
as a friend and customer for many years,” said Michael Ruffing from the witness stand. “About twice a month him and his party would come into my club and order drinks and food. He was a very good customer.”

“Did he spend a lot of money?” asked Eggert. He stood behind the podium, his body still, his voice calm, his questions short and non-leading. Eggert was a good enough lawyer not to steal the spotlight from his star witness.

“He was a very good customer, like I said. He never bought the cheaper wines. He always ordered the Dom, every time he came in. No matter how many were with him, that’s what he would order. Bottle after bottle.”

“What is ‘Dom’?”

“Dom Perignon, one of the finest champagnes made. It’s like drinking love, or at least that’s what I would tell the customers.”

“Is it expensive?”

“The price depends on the year. The ’seventy-eight you can’t even get, the ’eighty-five is about one-fifty a bottle, sure, but worth it.”

“And that’s what the councilman would order?”

“Nothing but the best, he told me. ‘Mikey,’ he used to say, ‘you’re either class or you’re shit.’ That’s what he used to say, and then to prove he was class he’d order
another four bottles of the Dom.” Ruffing looked at the jury and gave a little wise smile and whatever that smile was saying it looked like the jury agreed with him. The jurors had already heard the tapes, they had already heard a series of witnesses testifying about the waterfront deal and the City Council’s involvement, and now they were hearing the story of a shabby shakedown straight from the victim, a law abiding Center City businessman.

Michael Ruffing was a short, energetic man with thick hands and curly gray hair. He was one of the guys who grew up in the neighborhood and kept his neighborhood ways, his Philly accent, his rough talk, his way of shooting his cuffs and fixing his tie between questions. He had grown rich in real estate and lost everything in the bust and grown rich again with a series of nightclubs, the last and largest of which was Bissonette’s, which made him a name in the city. He was one of those developers who believed he could build anything he could envision, and he had envisioned a hotel and shopping complex on the waterfront that would draw tourists from five states and would be riverboat-ready when the governor, the only remaining obstacle to legalized gambling on the river, left office. But more than one visionary developer had run aground on the shoals of the Philadelphia waterfront, a cement-encased stretch between the Delaware River and I-95 that had defied commercial development on a grand scale. Ruffing was now testifying as to how his vision died and the part Jimmy Moore and Chet Concannon had played in its death.

“Now on these expensive outings of his at your club,” continued Eggert, “how did the councilman pay?”

“Cash. Sometimes he would put it on a tab when he was short, which was okay by us because he was in about twice a month like I said, and if he was short one visit he would make up for it the next. Actually it wasn’t the councilman that paid, it was Chet.”

“You mean Mr. Concannon.”

“That’s right. It was Chet who carried the money. Or if not Chet then it was the councilman’s media guy, Chuckie Lamb.”

“And he tipped well?”

“The councilman, sure. Chet too. But Chuckie wasn’t a great tipper. Whenever the councilman would catch him shorting one of the servers he’d give Chuckie hell, call him the cheapest bastard this side of Trenton.”

Everyone laughed at that and I did too. I turned around. Chuckie was sitting in the back of the courtroom. Well, almost everyone was laughing.

“Now, Mr. Ruffing, did there come a time when you entered into business discussions with Councilman Moore?”

“Yes.”

“And how did that come about?”

“One night, when Jimmy was in with his girlfriend and Chet…”

“Objection,” shouted Prescott from his seat.

I turned around again, quickly. In the row behind Jimmy sat his wife, Leslie. Her eyes were closed, her face tense, she was breathing deeply. Then she opened her eyes again and looked forward calmly. Chuckie had been right, Leslie Moore had known about Veronica all along.

“I ask that the answer be stricken,” said Prescott.

“I’ll so order,” said the judge. “Now, Mr. Ruffing, try only to answer my question. How did you enter into business discussions with Councilman Moore?”

“He was at the club one night and he called me over and made room for me to sit down next to him. I was actually busy and I tried to beg off but he insisted, so I sat.”

“And what did he say, Mr. Ruffing?” asked Eggert.

“He was angry. He told me he had heard I was setting up plans for the waterfront development and was seeking
help in the council but that I didn’t talk to him first. He told me he had been a good customer for a long time and that I had insulted him by not going through him to get approval for my plan. I told him I didn’t mean to insult him and that, sure, I’d love his help. So he said if we worked together he could be the best friend I ever had and that I should call him and I did. That’s when he told me he thought my plan would take off like a rocket ship and I thought that was great, that got me all excited. It was a good plan, it would have been good for the city, and I thought that Councilman Moore saw that too. So he told me to set up a meeting with Chet Concannon and I did.”

“When was that meeting?”

“A few days later. Chet sat down with me on a bench at Penn’s Landing and told how the legislative process worked with the council and how the councilman would propose the enabling legislation I needed for the development and shepherd it through a political obstacle course to get the legislation approved.”

“What did you say?”

“I told him I was excited about his help and was very optimistic. Then Chet started talking about CUP, that’s the councilman’s political action committee, and about all the good work it was doing, sponsoring drug treatment facilities, registering voters, organizing neighborhoods, general political stuff, you know. Now I’m no young kid from the suburbs, I knew what he wanted. So I told him, I said sure, how much do you want? That’s when he flabbergasted me.”

“What did he say?”

“He said one percent of the cost for the entire project. The thing was budgeted at one hundred and forty mil, if we got both the hotels we wanted and the shopping strip. So what he was demanding was a million four.”

“Did you agree?”

“Not at first. I couldn’t. How was I going to come up
with a million four right off the books? I wasn’t making enough on the club to cover it all and the financing was too tight to work with, really. The banks had it down to the penny. But Chet told me that I had to think of the future, how much could be realized if the waterfront plan went through. How much money I would make. And he said the councilman didn’t expect it all at once, he’d take it over time, which would make it easier. I still didn’t figure I could make it. But then he told me that the councilman had a lot of power on the zoning committee and would be looking very carefully at the plans and he told me that unless the councilman was certain of my commitment to help all the neighborhoods of the city he would kill the plan and any bills introduced to get it done.”

“How did you take that?”

“As a threat, sure. He was telling me I pay a million four or the plan was dead. I had been in real estate a long time, I knew the shakedown when I saw it, but I had already invested over a million in the design and initial purchasing of lots and I had mortgage commitments with penalties that I had signed personally, options that were costing me a fortune to keep up. I couldn’t afford to let it die.”

“So what did you do?”

“What could I do? I paid.”

“How much?”

“Chet said he would take a hundred grand to start, and then the same amount each month or so. And then he said the councilman would like a large part of it in cash so he could pay it out to the neighborhood organizers that were instrumental in running the programs.”

“How did you pay?”

“About once a month the councilman would call and give me an update on the project, how the bills were progressing through City Council. And then he would set up a
meeting for me with Concannon. I would meet Concannon at various places around the city. We’d talk about the deal, sometimes we’d have lunch. Everything was very friendly, you know. And then I’d pay him.”

“What would you give him?”

“A check made out to CUP for fifty thousand and the rest of that payment in cash in a manila envelope. What I did was set up a credit account at a couple of the casinos in Atlantic City and take out enough chips in bits and pieces over an evening to make up the fifty thousand. Then I’d cash out, asking for hundreds. Concannon told us the councilman liked the cash to be in hundreds and cleaned through the casinos.”

“To pay the neighborhood activists?” asked Eggert with a wry smile.

“That’s what Chet said.”

“And what happened in Council?”

“Oh, the councilman was true to his word. The project was moving through the system. It got stalled here and there, which you got to expect, it’s the city after all. And I was already running short of cash because of the delays, but the councilman was doing his part. But then, along with my money problems, Zack found out about the payments.”

“You mean Mr. Bissonette?” asked Eggert.

“Yeah, right. I had given him a small piece of the club in exchange for his name and every now and then he’d take a look at the books. When he saw these payments to the casinos and CUP he went crazy. He was a good guy, Zack, and I couldn’t really blame him. Said he wouldn’t be involved in anything that wasn’t completely legal, said he wouldn’t let profits from his club be used to bribe a councilman.”

“Objection,” said Prescott. “We don’t need to hear Mr. Bissonette’s interpretation of the legality of Mr. Ruffing’s campaign contributions to CUP. In any event, it’s hearsay.”

“Sustained,” said the judge.

“Fine,” said Eggert. “Did Mr. Bissonette get involved in the waterfront deal?”

“Yes,” said Ruffing. “When I told him I needed to keep paying Concannon because I couldn’t afford any more delays he said he could raise all the bucks I needed as long as I stopped giving any payments to the councilman. I was running out of cash for development. It didn’t help that I was dishing out about a hundred grand a month to Moore and Concannon. I needed a partner, so I said sure.”

“And he came up with the money.”

“Surprised the hell out of me, don’t know how he did it, but yes, he did. Enough to keep the options alive and the mortgage commitments going, which was what I needed. So I agreed to stop paying the money demanded by Moore and Concannon.”

“By that time, how much had you paid?”

“I had given CUP half a million dollars, exactly.”

“How did you stop making the payments?”

“I called up Moore and told him it was over.”

“What was his reaction?”

“He was apoplectic, what do you think? He told me he would send Chet over to talk with me.”

“Did you talk to Chet?”

“Sure, I told him I had no choice. I explained the thing with Bissonette. Chet told me if I stopped paying the deal was dead and that was just the start of it. He told me to think of the poor and the underprivileged, the drug addicted youth who had begun to rely on my payments. And then he told me if I stopped paying it wasn’t only the deal that would be dead. He told me the club could have licensing problems and other problems. He told me the councilman could no longer guarantee my safety. When he left, I was shaking I was so scared.”

“What did you do?”

“I didn’t have no choice. I had sunk everything I had into the development project and the only way it could go forward was with the money Bissonette brought in and Bissonette said no more payments to Moore. So I stopped paying. I thought maybe they was bluffing. Boy, was I ever wrong about that.”

“Objection,” said Prescott.

“Sustained,” said the judge. “Just tell us what happened after you stopped the payments, Mr. Ruffing.”

“One night, about two weeks after I stopped paying, in the club, we were closed then, it was after two and we were closed, I saw the councilman’s limo pull up and it looked like Moore and Concannon getting out. Bissonette was still there. I told Bissonette that I was getting out of there, but he said he’d stay and talk to them. As they approached the back door I got out the front. My car was in the back but I didn’t dare go back there. I took a cab home. Later that night I was called by the police and told that Bissonette had been beaten to near death and was in a coma. Just a few days ago he died, poor guy.”

“Anything else?”

“Yeah. A month later my club burned down. Arson.”

“And what happened to the waterfront development deal, Mr. Ruffing?”

“It’s gone, like the club. With Bissonette in the hospital and the plan delayed in Council I ran out of money. It would have been beautiful, but it all turned to crap. So I ended up with nothing, which is what I got right now, a lot of nothing. You know, when the councilman called me over, told me to sit with him, and said he could be the best friend I ever had, I was on top of the world. I had a hot club, I had a partner I admired and trusted in Zack Bissonette, you know how hard it is to find a partner you can trust? I had a waterfront deal in the works that was going to make me a name as big as Rouse, as
big as Levitt. I had everything going for me. Nine months after getting the councilman on my side I’m broke, the club is gone, the development deal has disappeared, and Bissonette is dead. With friends like that, Jesus.”