The Manhattan Hunt Club (3 page)

“Do you have anything to say before I pass sentence?” he asked.

Jeff hesitated. Should he try one more time to convince the judge that he was innocent? What good would it do? The jury had already decided. But there was one thing he had to say—one thing he’d never had a chance to say during the trial. He turned and once more met Cynthia Allen’s gaze. “I’m sorry,” he said softly. “I’m sorry I didn’t get there a few minutes earlier, so maybe none of this would have had to happen to you at all.” He held her gaze until she looked down into her lap. Then he turned back to face the judge once more.

Otto Vandenberg gave no sign that he’d heard Jeff’s words.

“I’ve listened to all the testimony in this case, and I’ve read the recommendations of both the prosecution and the defense. While the crimes of which you’ve been convicted are very, very serious indeed, and certainly are not to be taken lightly, I have also chosen to take into account the fact that this case—as do so many—comes down to one person’s word against another’s. I also have to take into account that prior to this case you have been an exemplary citizen, and that none of your psychological evaluations indicate that you are anything other than a perfectly normal young man.”

The flame of hope in Jeff flared up again.

“I therefore remand you to the custody of the Department of Correction for a term not to exceed one year, including time already served.”

Seven months! He would be out in just seven more months—maybe even less!

“I was right!” Jeff heard Sam Weisman whispering exultantly. “I had a feeling, and I was right! He believed you, Jeff!”

But then he heard another voice, which rose furiously from the back of the courtroom.

The voice of Cynthia Allen’s husband.

“A year?” he bellowed. “After what he did, you give him a year? I swear to God, I should kill him myself!”

Jeff whirled around to face the furious man.

“That’s what you deserve,” Bill Allen went on. “You should be dead.” Before anyone could react to his words, Bill Allen turned his wife’s chair around and pushed it out of the courtroom.

“W
hat do you mean, you don’t want to do anything about it?” Keith Converse asked. Though his voice remained steady, the tension in his face betrayed the anger he was feeling at the sentence the judge had read moments ago.

“Keith, you have to calm down,” Mary said, nervously eyeing the vein throbbing in Keith’s forehead. “Losing your temper won’t help.”

Keith’s eyes moved around the crowded conference room. Jeff sat at the end of a worn table with Sam Weisman flanking him on one side, Heather Randall on the other. Mary was sitting opposite their son, while a correction officer stood by the door, her expression utterly impassive. “Do you mind if I ask just what
is
going to help at this point?”

As if no one in the room was familiar with the case except himself, Keith Converse began reciting the events of the past few months. “First they arrest Jeff while he was trying to help that woman. Then, instead of letting him go and giving him a medal like they should have, they charge him with everything they can think of. Then they find him guilty, just because the same woman looks like she’s half dead, and everyone feels sorry for her.” He held up a hand against the protest he could see rising in Mary. “I’m not saying I’m not sorry for what happened to her. I am. But you know her being in that wheelchair influenced the jury, and now Jeff has to serve a year in jail for something he didn’t do. And is the victim even happy that someone got convicted? Oh, no—her husband threatens to kill Jeff!” He shook his head in disgust, and his gaze settled on Sam Weisman. “You’re supposed to be a lawyer—can’t we charge him with something? He can’t just threaten Jeff like that, can he?”

“He was upset, Dad,” Jeff said before Weisman could answer. “He didn’t mean it literally.”

“Good God, will you listen to yourself?” Keith sighed, shaking his head. “I swear, sometimes I don’t understand what makes you tick. You’ve been convicted of a felony, and it doesn’t bother you that someone just threatened to kill you, too? Don’t you have any idea what kind of spot you’re in?”

Jeff’s lips compressed. “I probably know what it means better than you do, Dad,” he said. He unconsciously placed his hand over Heather’s, his fingers tightening as his emotions threatened to erupt. “It’s over, Dad—they found me guilty, and there’s nothing that can be done about it. I was in the wrong place at the wrong time. All I want to do now is get through the next seven months, and then get on with my life.”

“What life?” Keith asked, his shoulders slumping tiredly. “You really think they’re going to take you back at Columbia after this?”

“Keith, don’t,” Mary pleaded. “We should be giving Jeff our support, not—” Her voice broke in the sob she’d managed to hold in check until then. “Oh, God,” she whispered, turning from her husband to her son. “I’m sorry, Jeff. I promised myself that no matter what happened, I wasn’t going to fall apart.”

“It’s okay, Mom,” Jeff told her. “If I’m lucky, I might be out in five months.” He forced a wry smile. “Hey, think of it as if I’m just taking a semester in Europe or something.”

Heather snatched her hand away. “How can you joke about it? Do you have any idea what it’s like out there? Daddy says—”

The mention of Perry Randall made Keith turn on her, his eyes smoldering. “Your ‘daddy’? You really think any of us care what your ‘daddy’ has to say?” Heather recoiled from the angry words, but Keith plunged on, finally finding a target upon which he could vent the frustration and anger that had been building in him over the months since Jeff’s arrest. “Did it ever occur to you that one word from your father would have ended all this months ago?”

“He couldn’t—” Heather began, but Keith silenced her.

“They don’t have to prosecute anything they don’t want to! The worst crooks in this city are walking the streets because they’re good buddies with guys like your father! You think I don’t know why he didn’t do something about this mess? It’s because people like him don’t think that what happens to people like us matters. So what if Jeff’s life is ruined? He doesn’t care!”

Heather’s eyes blazed and she stood up. “If that’s what you think—” she began, but cut her own words short. There’d been tension between her father and Jeff’s for a long time—a tension that had only increased as she and Jeff had begun to fall in love.
“He’s not our kind of people,”
her father told her over and over again.
“People like us marry other people like us—not the son of the handyman.”
And she knew Keith’s attitude was exactly the reverse—that he thought of her as nothing more than a society girl who would demand a standard of luxury Jeff would never be able to provide. She and Jeff had long since stopped trying to deal with either of their fathers on the subject, and now was certainly not the time to resurrect it.

She bent down and kissed Jeff. “I’d better go,” she said, her voice dropping. “Maybe they’ll let me come back later—”

Jeff reached toward her arm, but didn’t quite touch it. “This isn’t a hospital.”

Their eyes met, then Heather’s flicked toward Keith Converse for a moment. When he made no objection, she slowly sat back down. “I’m sorry,” she said quietly. “I just thought my fath—”

“It’s okay,” Jeff cut in. His gaze shifted to his father. “Look, Dad, none of this is anybody’s fault. It’s not Heather’s, it’s not her father’s, it’s not mine. It’s just something that happened. So let’s just try to get through it, okay?” Keith Converse’s jaw tightened, but he said nothing. “It could have been a lot worse—I could have gotten twenty years.”

“And he can be out in five months with good behavior,” Sam Weisman added.

“He shouldn’t be in there at all,” Keith insisted.

Jeff stood up and went to his father, felt the older man stiffen as he put his arms around him. “I’ll be okay, Dad. I’ll get through it, and so will you. But right now, there isn’t anything you can do about it. You’re just going to have to deal with the way things are.”

Keith’s arms came up and he embraced his son. “You be okay,” he said, his voice rough with emotion. “Don’t let ’em get to you, all right?”

“You bet, Dad.”

Jeff held on to his father for another second or two, and then the correction officer led him away.

CHAPTER 3

E
ve Harris was sorely tempted to ignore the buzzing of her intercom. The day, as always, had proved to be a couple of hours too short, and even though she tried her best to keep to her schedule, she had, as always, failed. First, the City Council meeting had gone on an hour longer than it should have, which wouldn’t have been fatal, since she’d learned on the first day of her first term on the council that no meeting of that body would ever end on time. Too many egos wanted the last word.

It was the meetings with constituents that always wound up completely destroying the schedule, because while Eve had a natural ability to screen out the more pompous of her fellow councilmen’s pontifications, she had no ability whatsoever either to end a meeting with one of New York City’s masses of the disenfranchised or to deafen herself to their complaints. In her first two terms, she’d earned a reputation for having not only the most accessible office on the council, but the best ears as well.

When her constituents talked—no matter how inarticulately—Eve Harris listened. It had always been so, from her first days at P.S. 154 up on 126th Street in Harlem, where all the other kids seemed to bring their problems to her, right through graduation from Columbia University, where she’d finished magna cum laude with a double major in sociology and urban planning. Nothing had changed, even after she’d married Lincoln Cosgrove and moved into Linc’s huge duplex on Riverside Drive. She’d kept her job with the city, doing what she could to make life better for the poorest of its citizens, spending endless hours solving what problems she could, and just as many hours listening to problems for which there seemed to be no solutions.

But Eve Harris—who had refused even to consider hyphenating her name to include Linc’s, let alone giving up her own—had always insisted there could be no insoluble problems in a city as complex as New York, no matter how unmanageable it might seem. It was simply a matter of finding the right minds, applying the minds to the problem, and implementing the solutions the minds came up with. Which was why, a year after Linc’s heart simply stopped beating on a beach in Jamaica on the first day of the only vacation they’d ever taken, Eve had agreed to run for City Council. Using only her own money and refusing any donation of more than ten dollars, she had easily gotten more votes than all the rest of the candidates combined.

Ever since, the doors to her office had been open to all the people who had no other access to the power structure of their city. She rarely worked less than sixteen hours a day, and never took a day off. And every day, it seemed as though there were more problems to be addressed, and less time in which to address them.

The intercom buzzed a second time, and Eve punched the button that would allow her assistant to speak directly to her. “What is it, Tommy?”

“Channel 4,” Tommy replied. “You’ll want to see it.”

Barely taking her eyes from the final revision of the speech she was due to give that evening, Eve switched on the television and flipped it to Channel 4. She recognized the face on the television screen—Cindy Allen, who had nearly been murdered in the 110th Street subway station last fall. But it wasn’t Cindy who was speaking—it was her husband. “—might as well have just let him go! How is anyone supposed to feel safe on the streets when—”

Her eyes still on her speech, Eve Harris switched the TV off and punched the intercom button. “How much time did he get?” she asked with no preamble. After five years as her assistant, Tommy would know exactly what she meant.

“He’ll be out in seven months, five if he behaves himself.”

Eve sighed heavily—if Jeff Converse had been black instead of white, he’d have been lucky to get out in fifteen years. And starting tomorrow morning, the families and friends of half her constituents would start calling her office, demanding to know why their sons, lovers, and fathers were sitting in jail for years while the white boy only got a slap on the wrist.

And Eve knew she would have no answers.

It was just one more thing that wasn’t fair.

One more thing she needed to work on.

Putting the speech aside, she picked up the phone and dialed the D.A.’s office. “What can you tell me about the Converse sentence?” she asked when Perry Randall came on the line. She listened to him speak for nearly five minutes, then shook her head. “What am I supposed to tell my people, Perry?” she asked. “If he was black, they’d have put him away for the rest of his life.” She barely paused, knowing the prosecutor would have no answer. “Oh, I’m not blaming you. It’s not your fault, is it?” She dropped the phone back on the hook, then stared at it, shaking her head. “That’s the bitch of it,” she muttered to herself. “Nothing is ever anybody’s fault.”

And that, she realized as she went back to work on her speech, was exactly why everything she did was so important.

B
y eight that evening the wind was whipping a cold rain through Foley Square and the park around City Hall, but Eve Harris didn’t even think about hailing a cab, let alone using one of the city cars that was always at her disposal. Instead she headed for the subway station, her head lowered against the wind and rain, and scurried down the stairs along with a smattering of other people whose overload of work had kept them in their offices three hours past the time when everyone else had gone home. Not that looking for a cab or taking a city car would have helped—the cabs had all vanished into the black hole that sucked up every cab in the city within minutes after the first drops of rain began to fall, and taking a car would have made the trip up to the Waldorf-Astoria twice as long as the run on the subway. She dragged her MetroCard through the slot with a well-practiced swipe, pushed through the turnstile, and headed down to the platform to catch a train that would drop her off virtually under the hotel. As the train rattled to a halt, Eve glanced at her watch. She wouldn’t get there in time for dinner, but that was all right—most of the people she would be talking about tonight wouldn’t be getting any dinner, so why should she? But she knew she would arrive in plenty of time to be on the dais when Monsignor McGuire was ready to introduce her. So it would be all right. She stepped into the car, sank onto a vacant seat, and was about to read through her speech one last time when a rough voice spoke.

“You Miz Harris, ain’t you?”

The woman was clinging to one of the poles in the middle of the car, perhaps to steady herself against its swaying as the train moved on, but more probably against the cheap red wine that had obviously been her dinner. The bottle—its neck sticking out of a crumpled and stained brown paper bag—was still clutched in her hand, and even as she gazed blearily at Eve through bloodshot eyes, she raised it to her lips, tipped it up, and sucked out another mouthful. As a few drops of the dark red fluid dribbled down her chin, she thrust the bottle toward Eve. “Want some?” she asked, her words half questioning, half challenging.

Eve felt the man next to her shifting in his seat, and didn’t have to look at him to know he was adjusting his newspaper to block his view of the shabbily dressed woman who seemed to be carrying all her possessions in three layers of plastic garbage bags so ragged that tufts of dirty material were bursting through in half a dozen places. Behind the woman, Eve saw two other people edge away before the woman could focus her attention on them.

Eve hesitated only a moment, then met the woman’s gaze straight on. “Actually, there’s nothing I’d like better right now,” she said. “But I’m on my way to make a speech, and I’m not sure I should.” The woman seemed to weigh her words, turning them over in her mind as if seeking some hidden meaning. As the train began to slow for the Canal Street stop, the man next to Eve stood up and scuttled toward the door at the far end of the car, as if afraid of getting too close to the woman who was still clinging to the pole. As another man started edging toward the empty seat, Eve patted it and smiled at the woman. “Why don’t you sit down?”

The woman’s eyes widened slightly, then darted first to one side, then the other, as if she couldn’t quite believe Eve was speaking to her. Half a dozen people were watching now, and the woman seemed about to bolt. “At least put your bag down for a minute. It looks heavy.”

Finally, the woman made up her mind. Plumping herself down on the seat next to Eve, she placed her bag between her feet, keeping her hand on it as carefully as if it were a case of diamonds. “Most people look the other way,” she said.

Eve folded up her speech, shoved it into the enormous leather shoulder bag she always carried, then groped around in the bag until her fingers found what she wanted. When her hand emerged, it was clutching a large, Hefty trash bag, one of the extra thick ones with drawstrings. “Maybe we ought to put your bag in this,” she suggested. “It might be raining pretty hard when you get off.”

“Might not get off till tomorrow morning,” the woman countered truculently.

Eve shrugged. “According to the weather report, it might rain for days. Besides, isn’t it always nice to have new luggage?”

Suddenly, the woman smiled, and let go of her bag long enough to stick her hand at Eve. “I guess it’s true what everyone says about you, Miz Harris. My name’s Edna Fisk. But everybody calls me Eddie.”

“Everybody calls me Eve,” the councilwoman replied. “At least my friends do.”

Through the next half-dozen stops, Eve Harris chatted amiably with Edna Fisk, who finished her bottle of wine during the course of the conversation, carefully recapped the empty bottle, and shoved it into her bag with her other belongings. “I’m not keeping it,” she said, even though Eve hadn’t questioned her. “I just hate litter. Soon’s I get off the train, I’ll put it in a trash barrel.”

“I wish more people were like you,” Eve observed. A moment later both women glared balefully at a man who left a crushed and greasy paper bag on his seat when he left the train at the next stop. “Some people are just slobs,” Eve said, getting up to retrieve the bag, then sitting back down next to Edna. “You want to dump this, or shall I?”

“I’ll take it,” Edna said, shoving the greasy bag in after her empty wine bottle. Then she smiled shyly, a black gap showing where one of her front teeth once had been. “And if I can still have that new luggage, I’d sure appreciate it.” By the time the train began slowing at Fifty-first Street, Eve had helped Edna Fisk get her worn bags inside the new one. “I guess what I heard was right,” she said as Eve stood up and moved toward the door. “You’re not much of a one for preaching.”

Eve Harris’s brows arched. “Oh, I preach, all right. I just like to reserve my preaching for those who need it.” She hesitated, then said, “There are places you could go, you know. . . .” But when Edna Fisk’s eyes clouded and she shook her head, Eve let her voice trail off. The train squealed to a stop and the doors slid open. “It was nice talking to you,” she said as she stepped out. She headed toward the stairs, the doors of the car slid closed again and the train pulled away. But as it passed, Eve looked up and saw Edna Fisk looking at her.

Looking at her, and smiling.

Twenty minutes later, as Eve stood on the dais of the ballroom in which the benefit for the Montrose Shelter for the Homeless was being held, she didn’t need to even glance at the speech she’d written. “Tonight,” she began, “a woman smiled at me. A woman named Edna Fisk. Let me tell you about her.”

Half an hour later, as her speech ended to a wave of applause—and a flurry of checkbooks—Monsignor Terrence McGuire leaned over to whisper in her ear. “I have to tell you, Eve—you’re full of more blarney than my father even thought of, and you’ve got more courage than anyone else I know. But all those people down in the subway aren’t like your Edna Fisk—a lot of them are dangerous, and if you get hurt down there, you aren’t going to be able to do Montrose House any good at all.”

“I’m not going to get hurt,” Eve assured him. “I’ve been riding the subways since I was a little girl, and nothing’s ever happened.”

“Well, you should consider yourself lucky,” the elderly priest went on. “Terrible things happen down there. There was the woman who almost got killed up on the West Side last fall—”

“That wasn’t one of my people,” Eve Harris cut in. “As I recall, it was an architecture student at Columbia.”

“It was not!” another voice cut in angrily. “Jeff didn’t do it!”

The priest and the councilwoman turned to see a young woman standing behind them, next to Perry and Carolyn Randall.

“Heather . . .” Eve heard the Assistant District Attorney say warningly, but the young woman ignored him.

“It was someone else,” she said. “Jeff was trying to help Cynthia Allen. The man who attacked her disappeared into the subway tunnel. Jeff said he looked like one of the homeless.”

Perry Randall’s hand tightened on the young woman’s arm. “My daughter,” he said to Eve, his lips forming a tight smile. “All she said was that she wanted to meet you.” He turned to Heather. “This is Councilwoman Harris, Heather.”

Eve offered Heather Randall her hand. “You know the young man?”

Heather nodded. “I’m going to marry him.”

Eve’s eyes flicked toward Perry Randall, and as she was searching for something to say, Randall himself rescued her.

“You can be sure we’ll send you an invitation, Eve,” he said, keeping his voice just light enough to take the edge off his words. “In the meantime, I think I’d like a drink. Terrific speech, Eve,” he added. “You can count on me for ten thousand this year.”

“And I’ll hold you to it,” Eve Harris assured him.

But as the crowd closed around her, Eve found herself watching Heather Randall as she moved toward the bar, and recalled her words:
“Jeff said he looked like one of the homeless.”
One of the homeless . . . Why did everyone always want to blame the homeless? she wondered.

Why did the homeless always have to take the rap?

But Eve already knew the answer to her own question—the homeless took the rap because they had nobody to defend them.

So she would just have to work harder.