Legal Tender (16 page)

“If you talk, I’ll listen. Leave the Boy Wonder at home. I think you can handle it on your own. I was surprised to see you takin’ orders, big-time lawyer like yourself.”

I smiled. “You’re trying to get my Irish up, Detective, but I’m not Irish. I think.”

His broad shoulder dipped as he started the car’s huge V-8. “You know, I used to wonder why lawyers like you do what you do. Now I just don’t care.”

“It’s cops like you that keep me in business.”

“Oh, we do it, that’s it?” He snorted. “Not the murderers, the rapists, the critters whose money you take.”

“You mean my clients? They have rights, the same as you. The right to an honest police force. The right to a fair trial. I never understood it better than I do now.”

He gunned the breathy engine. “You know what your problem is, Rosato? There’s no right or wrong for you. We can’t get a confession because of you, we can’t get a conviction because of you. You’re on the TV, in the papers, explaining everything away. Me, I was a priest before I was a cop.”

“I was a waitress before I was a lawyer. So what?”

“I know right from wrong.”

“I see, this is God’s law you’re enforcing now. You got a personal relationship with the Chief Justice in the sky. He picked you, out of all the weird ties.”

Azzic shook his head. “You don’t believe in God, do you, Rosato?”

“That’s kind of personal,” I said, to jerk his chain, but the answer was no. I stopped believing when I realized my mother lived a nightmare, every day of her life. Haunted, terrified, every single second.

“All right, don’t answer, I don’t give a fuck. Here’s how it is. I have twenty other cases on my desk, but this is the most important.”

“Is it my perfume?”

“Let me tell you something, funny girl. National clearance rate for homicides is about sixty-five percent. My squad, we run at about seventy-seven. Me personally, I’m doing even better than that. You know what that means?”

“You got a C average? You’ll never get into law school with that, pal.”

“It means I’m on your ass, wherever you go, ’til the day I put you behind bars.”

“Oh yeah? Then catch me if you can, Detective.” I ducked out of the car and took off.

The engine roared as Azzic pulled away from the curb, but I darted across the street and bolted the wrong way up the block. In two one-way streets, up Spruce Street and Pine, I had lost the local constabulary and was running free.

One, two, three, breathe. One, two, three, breathe.

Franklin Field is a football stadium and running track at the eastern edge of Penn’s campus, ringed by bleachers and a high, redbrick wall. I’d been running its steps once a week since college, to increase my wind and build strength for rowing. The electronic score-board was dark this time of year and the bristly Astroturf empty, but the steps were open for anyone crazy enough to run them.

One, two, three, breathe. I pounded from bleacher to bleacher, bench to bench. Straight up, at a fifty-degree grade. We called it running the steps, but running the steps would have been easy compared with running the benches, which were farther apart. I broke a sweat in the humidity of the hazy afternoon. Keep your knees high. One, two, three, breathe.

At the top were old wooden benches that had weathered to gray and splintered. Here and there a new plywood board had been installed, and heavy bolts, black with age and tarnish, stuck incongruously through the new wood. I played a game as I ran up the middle of the benches, sidestepping the bolts and letting my mind wander. It was the only way to remember. And I needed to remember.

One, two, three, breathe. Land on the balls of the feet. I raced up, my footsteps thundering as I reached the vertiginous heights of the stadium. I darted out of the sun and toward the airy top deck, under the painted iron rafters that supported the upper level of the stadium. It was breezy here, dark and cool. Still, up, up, up. Sweat poured down my forehead. My heart pumped like a piston. I’d run hard like this with Renee, that day. I tried to reconstruct it in my mind.

The sun is unseasonably hot. Renee is wearing a pair of navy gym shorts and a T-shirt that’s too thick. She’s sweating, her chest heavy, and a silver chain with a key bounces around her neck as she runs.

I landed on the top bench and stopped a minute, panting, then turned around and ran down again. One, two, three, down. Harder than it looked, going down, trying not to lose your balance a hundred feet from the ground, with your head dizzy from exertion. The bumpy tread on my sneakers gripped the wood of the bench and I bounded down, down, down, leaping from one bench to the next.

One, two, three, breathe. The lowest fifteen benches were of gaudy red and blue plastic, and I aimed for them headlong, past the wooden benches, down through to the plastic. When I reached the bottom I huffed just long enough to turn around again and start back up, an Ivy League Sisyphus.

One, two. I was breathing hard. Trying to maintain my rhythm. Trying to remember. Renee, at about thirty pounds overweight, isn’t able to keep up. She stops and rests, huffing and puffing under the rafters at the top of the stadium. It’s chilly there, cool as under the boardwalk. It feels private, too, almost secretive. She stops to catch her breath and I keep her company. We start talking.

I dashed up the red and blue benches and reached the wooden ones. There were numbers painted on them, white-stenciled; 2, 4, 6, 8. They were a blur then and they were becoming a blur now.

Renee’s conversation turns from work to clothes to men.
I
used to have a boyfriend,
she says.
But he threw me over.

I charged up the steps, past the white smear of numbers, the sun prickly on my back and shoulders. One, two, three. Breathe, girl. There were thirty-one benches in all. Or thirty. I tried to count them but each time it came out different. My conversation with Renee came back to me in bits and pieces, like a radio signal piercing static.

Sounds familiar
, I tell her. Our eyes meet and we both know I’m talking about Mark.

Told me to get out, just like that, in the middle of a snowstorm. And we were gonna buy a house together.
We’re sitting in the breezy shade under the rafters, our backs resting against the crumbly brick wall.
I
wasn’t so hurt, really. What I was most was angry. Damn, was I angry.

Me, too
, I say, thinking of Mark.

Remember. Think. I reached the top of the steps and stood in the shade, chest heaving, heart thumping. The wind swirled around me. My muscles tingled, my veins swelled with blood. I felt strong, good. I wanted to remember, I had to. I threw my arms out, stretching my fingers to the sky. Willing the memory to me, pulling it out of the blue.

I used to hope he’d die, like in a car accident,
she tells me, with a naughty giggle.
Every day I’d read the obituaries and pray he’d be there.

Really?

And every time I’d see that somebody younger than him died, I’d think, Damn
.
That was my
chance
. She snaps her fingers.

You should’ve just killed him,
I say.
That’s what
I’d
do. Why leave it to chance?
We both laugh out loud because we
both know I’m kidding.

But it won’t sound that way in the telling. To Azzic.

Or to the jury.

M
arshall’s rowhouse was in a gentrified part of West Philly, not far from Franklin Field, with a gingerbread porch in three different Cape May colors. I knocked at the green-painted front door in my damp tank top and shorts, and the door finally opened. Tiny bells attached to the inside knob made a tinkling sound.

“What do you want?” said the woman who answered. She was a long-haired waif in a long, filmy skirt, who evidently shared Marshall’s politics but not her sweetness.

“You must be one of Marshall’s housemates. I’m—”

“I saw you on the news. You’re Marshall’s boss.”

“Yes. She didn’t come in to work today.”

“I know that.”

“I’d like to speak with her.”

“She’s not here.”

“Where is she?”

Her only reply was a shrug, her shoulder bones protruding in the tie-dyed T-shirt.

“What’s that mean? You don’t know or you’re not telling?”

“Look, what do you want?”

“I want you to give Marshall a message for me, it’s important. Tell her I didn’t do it. And tell her I hope she didn’t either.”

She slammed the door in my face, and the bells jingled madly.

I jogged back toward the office over the South Street bridge, running into the city at a time when everybody was leaving. Traffic snaked toward the Schuylkill Expressway. The sun hung low, burning orange behind my left shoulder. Drivers flipped down their visors as they reached the crest of the bridge.

I was breathing smoothly, thinking about Renee and Marshall. There was nothing I could do about Renee, and unfortunately, the same was true of Marshall. Apparently, she wasn’t in danger, from her housemate’s reaction. That left one possibility. Did Marshall have something to do with Mark’s murder? She was the only one in the office who could navigate the depths of the computer system. Maybe she’d discovered Mark’s hidden files. Or were there other cybersecrets, ones I didn’t know about?

I loped up Lombard, going against the traffic, and turned down Twenty-Second Street, pounding past the Greek pizza place, a video store, and the fancier townhouses. I slowed to a walk when I neared the office, because of the commotion.

Squad cars lined the cross street, their red, white, and blue lights flashing a silent warning. Police sawhorses blocked off traffic, and cops blew whistles to keep the drivers moving. I felt wary, edgy. A crowd was gathering, and I strayed to its fringe, next to an old woman who stood squinting at the scene, her meaty arms folded over a sagging chest.

“What’s going on?” I asked. “An accident?”

“Don’t know ’xactly,” she answered, peering at me through thick Woolworth’s glasses. Her eyes, supermagnified, looked deranged. At her side stood a matted white mutt on a rope leash, with bluish cataracts over his eyes.

“Nice dog,” I said. I like all dogs, even ugly ones.

“Name’s Buster. He’s blind.”

“Blind? Does he bite?”

“No.”

I bent over to scratch the dog’s head, but he lunged at me with the two teeth he had left. “Hey! I thought you said he didn’t bite.”

“He nips, but he doesn’t bite.”

Sometimes I hate the city.

“The cops are lookin’ for somebody,” she said.

“Who?”

“Don’t know. Just heard it myself. It was drugs. That’s what caused the bombing.”

“What bombing?”

“That man, that drug man. They done got him.” She pushed up her glasses. “Put a bomb in his car, on account of the AIDS.”

“What?”

“The AIDS. It was on the news.”

“When?” Was it the CEO of Furstmann? Was it possible? “How?”

“They’re looking for the lady who done it. That’s what I heard.”

“What lady?” Eileen? The cops already had her address.

“A terrorist done it. Works right down here, right here in Center City. A lady lawyer. They’re gonna arrest her.”

My throat caught. Lady lawyer. Lives and works in Philly. It had to be me. What was going on? I felt stricken. I turned and hustled away from the police cars, my feet carrying me forward almost automatically. Where was I going? I didn’t even know. Away. Out of the city, far from the cops.

I picked up the pace to a jog then accelerated to a nervous sprint. My heart thudded, my pulse raced. It wasn’t exercise anymore, it was flight. I fled the city, away from the business district. Twilight descended as I ran, but I didn’t stop until there were no more police cruisers and I was out of breath. I lurched into a graffitied phone booth with a busted light, panting hard. I slammed the door closed and punched in my credit card number with clumsy fingers.

“Wells,” he said when he picked up.

“Grady, what is going on?” It would have been good to hear his voice, if I trusted him at all.