Saving Grace (46 page)

He led Jonathan into the room where Paul, Gracie, and Clara waited. Clara jumped up as the door opened. Her face was ravaged. “How many times has that boy eaten in my kitchen?” she demanded.

“Mama...” Jonathan held out his arms.

She hugged him. “Such a good friend, like my own child I treated him—look how he stabs us in the back. God curse him forever, the
gonif,
the liar.”

“Let’s go home,” Jonathan said. Over her head he looked at Gracie, whose face was pale and grim, and at Paul, who would not meet his eyes.

Christopher Leeds led them to a back door that opened into an alley. The car was waiting on the corner to their left, he told them. He took Jonathan’s arm and opened the door.

A shrill whistle sounded from their right as they emerged into the fading light. “Come, let’s hurry,” Leeds said, breaking into an ungainly trot. They reached the limousine only steps ahead of a dozen pursuing reporters and cameramen, all shouting Jonathan’s name. The driver, a young clerk in Leeds’s office, jumped out and opened the back door. Jonathan stood back to let his mother and daughter enter first, but Christopher Leeds shoved his head down and bundled him into the car, sliding in beside him. Clara followed, and Paul went around the car to the front passenger seat.

Above the baying of the reporters: “Fleishman! Fleishman!” one voice stood out: “Gracie!” it shouted.

Gracie looked back. Barnaby emerged from the crowd. She didn’t recognize him at first. Not because he’d changed, but because he hadn’t. By her internal reckoning, years had passed since their affair; decades. She’d aged. What a shock to see him looking younger than she felt, hale and hearty. How strange to look upon that frank and open face, that shaggy beard, tousled hair, the puppy-dog friendliness of his brown eyes.

“Gracie,” he said warmly, as if all that had happened hadn’t.

Jonathan bent down to see what was delaying his children. “Son of a bitch,” he cried. “I don’t believe—” He lunged for the car door handle.

Leeds stopped him. “Let her handle this. She’s capable.”

Paul vaulted over the hood of the car, landing beside Grace. “Leave my sister alone, you prick. She doesn’t want to talk to you.”

Barnaby ignored him. “ Gracie, darlin’, we need to talk. Let’s go somewhere.”

She said nothing, but looked at him with such disdain he took a step backward. Poor girl, he thought. They’ve really got to her.

The reporters had forgotten Jonathan. Their attention and cameras were focused on Grace and Barnaby. He ignored them and spoke to her alone. “Gracie, you have a choice. You don’t have to play Daddy’s good little girl. You don’t have to stay with him.”

Paul shook his head in wonder. “You really believe she’d go anywhere with you?”

“Let’s get some coffee. Then, if you still want to go home, I’ll take you.” Barnaby held out his hand.

Gracie slapped his face, hard. Flashbulbs and strobes flared all around. “Once again for the cameras!” someone yelled.

Hurt and astonishment suffused Barnaby’s face. He put a hand to his cheek and backed away. A woman surged into his place and thrust a microphone toward Gracie. “Why’d you do it, Miss Fleishman? Why’d you slap him?”

“It’s what you do to mosquitoes,” Gracie said with a shrug.

* * *

Jonathan followed his lawyer’s advice: he went home, closed himself in his study, put his feet up, had a drink. Had two. Waited for rational self-interest to reassert itself. At eleven o’clock he watched
Eyewitness News.
Gracie had upstaged him: all the clips were of her slapping Barnaby. When he heard what she had called him, Jonathan burst into cleansing laughter.

“You didn’t know who you were messing with,” he said to the screen. “You didn’t know my Gracie.”

Suddenly he felt hungry. He switched off the set and went down to the kitchen, where he made bacon, toast, and scrambled eggs. Lily, who’d watched his cholesterol count like a hawk, had rarely allowed bacon into the house; but since Jonathan had begun doing the shopping, he’d made it a staple. What the hell did he care about cholesterol?

When he finished, he washed the frying pan and put the dishes into the dishwasher. Upstairs, he made the rounds that, since Lily’s illness, had become habitual, almost compulsive. No sound came from Paul’s room, though light shone through the keyhole. From Gracie’s room came a light, rhythmic thumping.

He knocked and entered. She was kneeling, fully dressed, on the mattress that was her bed, pounding a pillow with her fist. Wispy feathers floated through the air; some had settled in her hair and one stuck to the corner of her mouth, giving her a feral look. Grace looked up at him and suddenly he saw himself reflected in her face: she had his eyes, his bone structure, his intensity.

“What’s the matter, Gracie?”

“I hate him,” she said.

“The mosquito? He’s not worth hating.”

Gracie stared blankly. “Not that pest. Michael Kavin. I hate him. He’s the lowest slime that ever crawled on earth. He has no right to exist, no place in this world. I despise him, I loathe detest shit piss spit on him.”

Jonathan shut the door. “I pity him.”

“Pity? After what he did to you?”

“What he did to me is nothing compared to what he’s done to himself.”

“Which is what? He made a deal, he’ll walk away with a slap on the wrist, that bastard. Oh, God.” She hugged the battered pillow to her stomach. “I feel like I’m exploding.”

“There’s nothing left to hate. My old friend Michael is no more. He destroyed himself today.”

“I wish he had. I wish he’d shot himself. A dead man couldn’t do what he’s done to you.”

“He didn’t,” Jonathan said. “I did it to myself.”

34

JONATHAN SAID, “I NEED YOU TO BE ALL right with this.”

“I’m not ‘all right with this.’ I’ll never be ‘all right with this.’ You want to put a noose around your neck, that’s your business. But you’re asking me to knock the chair out from under your feet, and that’s very much my business, and I’m damned if I’ll do it.”

They sat alone in the back of Christopher Leeds’s car, traveling to the courthouse. The lawyer’s cheeks were a fiery red, stained by anger or distress or both.

Jonathan said gravely, “I am absolutely convinced this is the right thing for me.”

“It’s madness, man! You think you’re going to stand up in court and say,
‘Mea culpa,’
and the judge will say what a good boy you are and send you home? You’ll go to jail, Jonathan. You could rot in prison for twenty years. Is that what you want?”

“Of course not, but I’m prepared to accept the sentence of the court. Don’t desert me, Christopher.”

“You’re deserting yourself, fool,” he groaned.

“On the contrary: I’m finding myself.”

Leeds ran his hands over his bald pate. “You feel a need to confess, you want to cleanse your soul, talk to God, not the court.”

Jonathan said coldly, “I have nothing to say to God.”

“Think how your enemies will gloat. The prosecution will say they had us beat so badly we just lay down and died.”

An acerbic note crept into Jonathan’s voice. “I’m fucking up your batting average, is that it?”

“I don’t deserve that, Jonathan.”

“No, you don’t. Sorry.”

“We could win, you realize. You could walk out of that court a free man.”

“You think I should?”

Leeds smacked himself on the forehead. “Whose side are you on?”

“I’m trying to get back on side.”

“It’s Lily. I should have anticipated this. You feel life’s not worth living anymore.”

“I think she would approve. But I’m not doing it because she died. It’s an act of hope, not despair.”

“It makes no sense,” the lawyer said. “What’s changed? Why are you doing this?”

“I’ve changed. Little by little, bit by bit, I became a man I would have despised as a boy. And now that I see it, I want to get back.”

“You’re asking me to betray you. You want me to play Judas.”

“Which would make me what, Jesus Christ?” Jonathan said with a laugh. “Christopher, I chose you for my advocate. If you really are my advocate, you’ll help me do the right thing.”

Christopher Leeds closed his eyes and remained for some time with his head sunk onto his chest. Presently he said in a resigned voice, “Have you told your family?”

He had, that morning at breakfast. Next to tossing dirt onto Lily’s coffin, it was the hardest thing he’d ever done. He’d told them what he had decided and why. When he finished, there was silence.

The children looked in their laps. Clara stared straight ahead. Her lipstick was a brilliant red slash across her ashen face.

“Mama,” he said, “are you all right?”

“Sure, sure. You stick a knife in my heart and ask if I’m all right? Don’t do this, Jonathan.”

“I have to.”

Clara pushed back her chair and walked out.

Paul said, “She was right about you, that prosecutor bitch. She said you were full of pride, and she’s right. Tart it up however you want, that’s what it comes down to.”

“How can you say that, Paul? To stand up and publicly admit I did wrong, I betrayed my own principles—is that pride?”

“It’s pride dressed up as humility.”

Jonathan looked taken aback.
 
“Call it what you like,” he said, “it’s all I have left.”

“If you do this thing, if you shame us this way, so help me God, I’ll never speak to you again.”

“Son—”

“Don’t call me that.” Paul stalked out, leaving Gracie alone with her father.

“You don’t have to do this,” she said. “It’s not necessary.”

“Yes, sweetheart, it is.”

“The last time I talked with her, Mom said I had misjudged you. She said I was always too hard on you. I think she was right.”

“I’m not so sure,” he said.
 

* * *

“Is the prosecution ready?”

“Yes, your Honor.”

“Is the defense ready?”

Christopher Leeds stood. “Your Honor, my client wishes at this time to change his plea—”

“Objection!” Buscaglio screamed.

“How can you object to that?” Leeds said, not looking at her.

Judge Malina rose. “In my chambers, please. You too, Mr. Fleishman.”

“Mr. Leeds,” the judge said, when the door closed behind them, “is there something I should know? Have you and the prosecution reached an agreement?”

Leeds and Buscaglio answered in unison: “No, your Honor.”

“Have you advised your client of the possible—I might even say probable—consequences of pleading guilty?”

“Indeed I have, your Honor.”

Malina’s hawk eyes fastened on Jonathan. “Do you understand, Mr. Fleishman, that you could be sentenced to twenty years in prison for these offenses?”

“I do, your Honor.”

“Do you harbor some hope that because of your record, you will be let off with community service? Because if that is your thinking, Mr. Fleishman, let me advise you that in my opinion, sentencing you to community service would be like throwing Brer Rabbit into the briar patch.”

“No, ma’am, I don’t.”

“Do you imagine that as a reward for pleading guilty, you will be let off lightly?”

“No, your Honor. All I ask, and it is a request, not a condition, is that before you dismiss the jury, you allow me to address the court.”

Judge Malina sat back and stared pensively at Jonathan. She was a woman in her sixties, gaunt-faced, with eyes as sharp as her tongue and a reputation for severity in sentencing.

She said, “Are you mad, sir?”

“No, your Honor, not mad. Guilty.”

“Guilty of the crimes with which you are charged? Or guilty of surviving your wife?”

Jonathan’s face darkened. “Both; but one has nothing to do with the other.”

“So you say. I tend to doubt it. I’m not sure I can allow this change of plea. It seems to me you’re acting under the stress of your bereavement, against your own self-interest.”

“With respect, your Honor, I am the best judge of that.”

“What do you say, Mr. Leeds?”

They all looked at Christopher Leeds, Jonathan with some anxiety. The monkish lawyer opened his mouth and closed it without utterance.

“It’s a ploy, your Honor,” Buscaglio burst out. “It’s a preemptive bid for sympathy. The defense knows they’ve got no case.”

The judge gestured impatiently for silence. “What say you, Mr. Leeds?”

He replied, “It’s an act of conscience, not despair.”

Buscaglio spluttered.

“Ms. Buscaglio,” Judge Malina said testily, “what exactly is your problem? If Mr. Fleishman changes his plea, you’ve won your case.”

“But she doesn’t get to grandstand,” Christopher Leeds said in an unusual display of spite.