Star Time (74 page)

"I guess no matter how irritating it might get, we just have to keep remembering that it was worse being apart."

She hugged him tenaciously, but her voice was forlorn again, tentative. "That's not very much to start with."

"Not much at all."

"And not very romantic."

Greg's voice grew stronger. "But it's something! It won't be easy, but it certainly is something."

"Maybe it's as much as you ever get."

"Maybe," he said. "Maybe in real life that's all there is."

Author's Bio

Joseph
Amiel
is an internationally best-selling novelist, screenwriter, web series creator, and lawyer.
He is the author of the novels
Hawks, Birthright, Deeds, Star Time, and A Question of Proof.
He is married and lives in New York.

Prologue

"He's dead!" the woman's voice screamed into the telephone receiver. "He isn't moving. He's dead!"

The 911 operator immediately transferred the call to a dispatcher.

"What's the address, ma'am?" the man's voice asked.

"Send an ambulance—someone—right away! Help him, please!"

"What's the address?" the dispatcher repeated. "Ma'am, we need to know the address."

"The address?" she asked, not comprehending the question and repeating the words aloud to hear them once again. "It's on Walker Drive.
In Chestnut Hill."

"What number, ma'am?"

She told him, and then she cried out, "Come quickly! Peter's dead!"

"One moment, ma'am."
The dispatcher clicked off. A few seconds later he was back on the line. "What's your name, ma'am?"

She gave him her name.

"And the name of the victim?" the dispatcher asked.

"Peter
Boelter
."

"Jesus!"

"For God's sake, hurry!"

"A squad car and ambulance are already on their way."

The woman fumbled the phone back onto the cradle.

The squad car arrived in less than five minutes, the ambulance in eleven. The rescuers were far too late. The body of Peter
Boelter
, publisher of the city's dominant newspaper, the
Philadelphia Herald,
was already growing cold.

Five months earlier, on a night in January, Dan Lazar awoke to the sound of a key in his apartment's front-door lock and then Mara's quick high-heeled click along the hallway to the bedroom. Mara worked for Dan and his partner's small law firm and had spent the day at the York County courthouse, about an hour and a half's drive from Philadelphia. She had been defending a shopkeeper charged with burning down his failing men’s clothing store.

Eyeing the red clock-radio numerals, Dan started to reach for the lamp switch.

"Don't get up," Mara whispered, solidifying into a silhouette against the moonlight filtering through gauze curtains behind her. He heard her dress rustling and then saw it rise over her head and descend onto the chair like a black parachute.

"It's almost one in the morning."

"Sorry," she said, anticipating his annoyance. "I told you on the phone I was going to be late.'' Her faintly Eastern European accent curled around the apology like an intimacy whispered over espresso at a street café. As an adolescent, she had fled with her mother to America after her father died in a Rumanian prison.

"A
little
late, you said. I phoned the York County prosecutor's office at nine. Everyone had gone for the night."

Her tone conveyed her resentment that Dan had checked on her. "We went out to dinner to hammer out a plea bargain."

"You could have negotiated a Middle East peace treaty in less time."

"Almost as good.
One count of recklessly endangering another
person,
and the prosecution will drop the arson charge. Our client is hoping that way he can hang on to the insurance money.
Proud of me?"

She slipped into bed against him. He kissed her, fitting his nakedness to hers, inhaling her perfume. Dan was in love with Mara
Szarek
, and although he had no reason to doubt the explanation for her lateness, he knew he would never be sure. She was like a cat, independent and
unbeholden
and, as a consequence, always intriguing. You took her on her terms. Dan was attracted to that quality in her because he himself was just as autonomous, never depending on anyone and wanting no one to depend on him.

"I worked late myself," he admitted. "Montano's preliminary hearing comes up tomorrow."

"How does it look?"

"I think I can discredit Feeney's testimony, but I can't be sure. He wouldn't speak to me.
On the DA's orders, probably."

Mara's index finger brushed back and forth across Dan's lower lip. "I had a wonderful birthday dinner planned for you."

She kissed his throat and then licked slow loops along the edges of his chest muscles and down the hard furrows forming his abdomen.

"I'll make it up to you," she whispered, pulling back the blanket.

Her long fingernails lightly etched spirals lower down, eventually around the hardness that rose up to them. She kissed the soft skin inside his thigh, provoking a shiver. Then, without warning, she withdrew from the bed.

"One second," she promised.

She flipped a switch inside the bathroom. Light streamed through the crack between the door and the jamb, suffusing the bedroom with dim illumination and spotlighting her small, sultry face like a brooch on black velvet.

"Why the light?" he asked as she glided back toward him. Mara did little on whim.

Her dark eyes glittered with sly intent.  Her upper lip, a tiny, blood-red Saracen's bow, lifted into a wicked smile. "I want you to be able to watch."

She kneeled between his feet, her head lowering again toward his thighs.

"Happy birthday, Dan."

Early in the morning, dressed to leave, Dan had just brought in the
Herald
from outside the apartment's front door and was gazing at the front page when Mara emerged from the bedroom.

"You going to work?" she asked. "It's still dark out."

"The health club."

A shade under six feet tall, he had dark, nearly black eyes above a nose that had survived a lot of youthful fights more or less straight.
His full head of curly black hair ended a bit below his collar. He wore it long not because he thought it becoming or fashionable, but simply out of inattention to how he looked. At forty-two, he possessed a casual handsomeness that greater care with his appearance might not have achieved.

"I could make us some breakfast," Mara offered. "Is there anything in the fridge?"

"There's milk for coffee." Dan rarely ate home, but had remembered to pick up milk in case Mara stayed over. She kept some clothing at his apartment.

"I like seeing you here when you wake up," he said. She looked soft and vulnerable swaddled in his blue terry-cloth robe. "It's been a while since we had time for each other.  What’s on your schedule for the morning?"

"I thought this morning I'd catch your cross-examination at the preliminary hearing."

"According to the
Herald,
there won't be much of a cross to watch.”

He handed her the newspaper.  FEENEY TO NAME MONTANO AS CO-ED KILLER
,
the banner headline read and below it was a smaller one that read: DA LAUDS HERALD DRIVER'S I.D. AS KEY.

Because Dan had been away skiing with his son, Mara had done a lot of the early legal legwork when Ricardo Montano was arrested for
Cassy
Cowell's rape-murder, the second such crime in a month: representing Montano at the preliminary arraignment, investigating the charges,
meeting
with people from the district attorney's office, interviewing witnesses. Upon his return Dan took over. To his consternation, he soon found confidential information damaging to his case turning up in front-page
Herald
stories. He was convinced the district attorney, Gilbert
Huyton
, had purposely leaked the information.

Their antagonism went back to a case they had fought early in their careers. The two had taken an immediate and inevitable dislike to each other;
Huyton
, then a young assistant DA, pegged Dan as a devious wise guy; Dan, then working for the public defender's office, considered
Huyton
arrogant and dogmatic. Since Montano's arrest, bitter charges, countercharges, and insults had flown back and forth in the press.

Mara glanced up from the newspaper. "You probably won't like what I'm going to say: Granted the
Herald
went a little overboard about Feeney because he works for them, but we both know it's a good, impartial newspaper."

"That isn't a very impartial headline."

"Step
back
a second, Dan.
Stop thinking like Montano's advocate.
We both know
Huyton's
got an open-and-shut case."

"The judge might have a different view of things."

His tone startled her. "Dan, set my mind at rest. Tell me you don't have a chance of getting that killer off."

He shrugged noncommittally, slipped on his overcoat, and bent to kiss her good-bye.

She pulled back, her tone insistent. "Feeney identified Montano in a lineup."

"
After
Montano's photo appeared in the paper and on TV broadcasts.
My dead grandmother could have identified him then."

"Dan, that bastard Montano is a rapist, a murderer!"

Dan reached for the door. "I'll see you at the hearing."

Dan's visit to the shabby sanctum of the health club proved to be a mistake. On the treadmill, he got caught up in a conversation with two of the other regulars, took a misstep, and twisted his knee. He insisted on finishing the workout and then, after showering and changing, walked fast up Broad Street to his office, where he picked up his briefcase, and then two blocks farther north to City Hall.

With the traffic light against him, he stood staring across the stream of traffic at the late-Victorian, wedding cake of a structure. The largest, tallest building in the country when it was constructed well over a century earlier, City Hall somehow managed to cram beneath its mansard roof the
mayor's
and City Council's facilities, several other municipal offices, and a jumble of forty-nine
courtrooms.

The first time he had ever entered the building's ornately embellished splendor was to file papers for a lawyer's service he worked for to put himself through Temple University Law School at night. He had been as dazzled by the building as by the aspirations it embodied for him. Now, a decade and a half later, he had ascended to the pinnacle of the city's criminal defense bar, and the building's attractions had begun to pall on him; each duel wore him down a little more than the last and faded more quickly into the blur of previous contests.

Crossing the street after the light changed, he was struck by the thought that City Hall's architecture perfectly symbolized the building's hypocrisy; its facade bustled with impressive columns and pilasters and innumerable dark windows that masked the self-dealing inside. This city, the birthplace of the nation's democratic institutions, had a long history of electing crooked, incompetent public officials, who were careful to stay on the good side of the powerful families that long dominated the city's social and economic life, but who, for the most part, shrank from dirtying themselves in the muck where the infighting of elective office occurred. 

Atop the building stood the embodiment of that duality, the statue of William Penn. Penn had founded the city and the commonwealth as a sanctuary where his Quaker coreligionists and others could live in safety. Head among the clouds, gaze fixed idealistically on the horizon, his statue provided a visible symbol of both the Quakers' admirable tolerance for other viewpoints and their pacifism's unfortunate effect of withdrawal from rough political tussles that had left the field open to hungry, unscrupulous newcomers. Inadvertently, Penn’s index finger, at hip height, pointed at the former red-light district and looked very much in profile like a lustier, more shocking physical appendage. Perhaps to calm old Billy down, prostitution had shifted location over the years and now transpired in good part behind his back. Dan's client, Ricardo
Montano, had been pimping for two women working the corner of Thirteenth and Locust on the night
Cassy
Cowell was murdered less than a block away.