Where Nobody Dies (10 page)

“Oh, God,” I groaned, the reality closing in on me. “What you're saying is that it's not finished—that whoever tried to break in this afternoon will try again until they find what they're looking for.”

I got two nods. “You'd better find a safe place for that stuff, Cass,” Ezra warned. “A safe deposit box, maybe. And Cass,” he added, his face serious, “you'd better let these people know you don't have the stuff anymore.”

I thought about safe places while Dorinda cleared up and she and Ezra bickered good-naturedly about the Morning Glory. My mind was only half on their conversation, but the sound of human voices cheered me. I wasn't ready to go back to an empty office or apartment—especially with an uneasy dread that they wouldn't be empty enough.

“Take-out,” Ezra pronounced, leaning back in his chair with an authoritative air. “Remember in
The Graduate
when that guy says to Dustin Hoffman, ‘I've got just one word for you:
plastics'
?” It was a rhetorical question and Dorinda, her hands in the suds, knew it.

“Well, the word for the eighties is
take-out
. I can see it.” Ezra's face took on the faintly spaced-out look it got when he contemplated profit margins. “All these singles coming home to lonely apartments. Two-career families where nobody has time to make dinner. They're tired of eating out, tired of staying dressed from work. They want to relax in front of the TV, but they don't want McDonald's, they don't want Wendy's. They're used to eating well. What do they want?”

Dorinda gave me a grin, so we both joined in the inevitable answer: “Take-out!” we shouted in unison, then laughed. I'd been here before, but it took my mind off bent bars and blackmail.

“The dishes you already serve here are perfect,” Ezra said with enthusiasm. “Curried vegetables, great soups, all kinds of ethnic foods. Just add a couple of quiches—”

“No quiche,” Dorinda replied, her tone adamant. “I refuse to be trendy. This is a working-class luncheonette, not a yuppie hangout. No quiche, no butcher block, no kiwi fruit.”

“Who said anything about kiwi fruit? I
did
suggest you could cut down on the alfalfa sprouts, but what the hell, it was only a thought. But as for the idea that this place is working class—” Ezra was getting hot under the collar, his face reddening. “First of all, very few workers eat lunch in Cobble Hill. Second, the ones that do grab a hamburger or Kentucky Fried; they
don't
eat vegetarian. You can serve all the stuffed cabbage and black bread in the world, babe, but this is not a blue-collar lunch spot. Besides, we were talking about take-out. So don't serve quiche here, just sell it to go.”

“Ez, I'm already getting up at five
A
.
M
. to open for breakfast at seven. Then it's lunch and an occasional afternoon snacker. We close at three-thirty and I spend the rest of the afternoon and evening cooking and baking for the next day. When do I make this take-out and how late do I have to be open to sell it?”

“Good questions,” I put in. It was funny to see Dorinda, my least practical friend, turning into a businesswoman before my eyes. With, it must be said, Ezra's help.

Of course, Ezra had answers. Of course, Dorinda didn't like them. Of course, the argument ended in the usual friendly stalemate.

Finally, Dorinda's cooking was done, and we stepped out of the restaurant together. As Ezra kissed me good-bye, he whispered, “Cass, I've got one word for you, too: burglar alarm.”

“Why is sex always so much better when you're on trial?” Matt Riordan's famous courtroom voice was lazy as he murmured the question into my ear. We both knew the answer, so I replied with a quick hug instead of words. The adrenaline that had carried him through the long, rough court day and the brutal press conference that followed had propelled him into bed. Our lovemaking had been as intense as his cross-examination—and just about as tender. I understood. I try cases, too.

A muffled snore woke me from a light doze. I raised myself on one elbow and turned to see Matt, exhausted from his long day of performing for court and camera, thoroughly asleep.

Reminded of the scene in
Gaudy Night
in which Harriet Vane's sympathy is aroused by a sleeping Lord Peter, I smiled at my slumbering lover. Sleep had taken years from him; gray-flecked black hair, tousled like a toddler's, fell across his brow. One hairy arm was flung protectively over his head, as if to ward off a blow. It was, I realized, the only time I'd ever seen Matt Riordan vulnerable.

And yet, vulnerable he was, and growing more so every day. His entire professional life had been spent on a tightrope, with clear lines of demarcation between what he would and would not do for his clients. Now the lines were beginning to blur. Already the press slyly insinuated that hiring Matt Riordan for the defense was itself a confession of guilt. He'd been held in contempt during his last trial, and before that a federal judge had publicly questioned his ethics. There were new worry lines around the shrewd blue eyes, and it was taking two or three more glasses of whiskey to relax him after a day on trial.

The tightrope on which he'd always performed was swaying now. I'd tried to talk to him, to share my fears for his future, but Matt Riordan, who'd always prided himself on working without a net, had only laughed.

Now, watching him sleep away the tension, I found myself wishing I'd pushed the conversation harder, made Matt listen. The feeling was irrational; I knew from experience that no one made Matt Riordan do what he didn't want to do. And so I sighed and pulled the covers up to his chin. Then I slipped out of bed and went for my coat.

I went home to Brooklyn. There wasn't much to smile at in my thoughts, so I spared an inner laugh for the graffiti in the Bergen Street station:
In God we trust, in transit we bomb
.

At home, I quickly undressed and sat down to finish the latest Arthur Lyons. It was great, as usual, but the words began to blur before my eyes. Sitting in the glare of a single lamp, a comforter wrapped around me, I thought at first that the real mystery that had entered my life was dwarfing the fiction, but then I found my thoughts wandering.

Nathan. I felt a sharp pang of loss as I remembered my dead lover. I'd buried my grief in work, realizing for the first time the fierce joy I took in practicing law on my own, without the safety net of Legal Aid. I had a moment's pride, thinking how proud of me Nathan would have been.

My house. It was more than a building that devoured my cash—it was a responsibility bigger than any I'd ever known. In a way, it represented all my hopes for the future. It
was
my future—my office, my home, my business. I'd feared for its life before I'd ever heard the name Ira Bellfield. All my anxieties about leaving my job and starting out on my own seemed to center on that one four-story building. I'd visualized it in ashes, or burglarized, or, most humiliating of all, foreclosed on, several times a day for the last six months. The fact that my fears had coalesced into a horribly realistic prospect was something even Sigmund Freud couldn't have anticipated.

Riordan. He was attractive. He was dangerous. He was also in danger, yet he made it clear he wanted no help from me or anyone.

Being alone. Proud as I was of my ability to handle my caseload, my responsibilities as a homeowner, there were times I wanted to share the burden, to feel someone else's shoulder pushing along with mine. For all Matt Riordan and I could understand each other, we were irrevocably separate, our paths wholly distinct.

Being needed. By Matt Riordan, by Dawn Ritchie, by someone. When in hell had
that
become important to me?

8

It was your basic New York City government building, old and drafty, but efforts had been made. The walls were white, the woodwork fire-engine red. The lobby was lined with lithographs of famous fires being fought from horse-drawn engines, while horrified citizens in Victorian dress looked on. There was a glass partition with FDNY and a fireman's hat emblazoned in red. I knocked, went in, and asked for Fire Marshal Duncan Pitt.

I don't know why his being black surprised me. So Linda was an equal opportunity blackmailer. Or maybe, having known Button, as honest a cop as ever wore blue, I unconsciously considered corruption a white man's disease. I tried not to let my surprise show as I sat in the wood chair, one of two in his tiny office. It was purely a working environment; every inch of the scarred desk was covered with reports. I wondered idly how many were honest and how many were doctored.

The phone rang. As Pitt answered it, I took stock of him, trying to get a clue as to how best to conduct what I suspected would be a very difficult interview.

Pitt was a big man, balding, with a salt-and-pepper mustache and full lips. He had a tough drill sergeant's face and a voice to match. Yet the cut of his uniform, the perfectly trimmed hair, the almost exaggerated precision of his speech gave me a sense of a man who cared greatly for appearances.

The only personal touch in the drab office was photographs. On the desk, pushed aside by papers, were graduation pictures of a boy and a girl, both with even-toothed smiles that probably cost a pretty penny in orthodontists' fees. I hoped I wasn't going to hear Pitt use them as an excuse for what he'd done.

On the wall, there were the standard political photos I'd seen a hundred times in judges' chambers all over the city. Photo opportunities with the candidate of the moment, displayed to demonstrate the political clout of the person doing the displaying. But the person shaking hands with Shirley Chisholm, Andrew Young, and Jesse Jackson wasn't Pitt, but a light-skinned woman whose broad, buck-toothed smile seemed familiar. If she was the mother of the graduates, I thought, I was right about the orthodontics.

“Well, Counselor,” Pitt began in an expansive tone that seemed to have nothing to hide, “what can I do for you?”

“I represent a young man named Tito Fernandez,” I began crisply. “He's charged with arson, second-degree. You filled out the fire marshal's report.” I put my briefcase on my lap, opened it with a snap, and pulled out the report I'd gotten from the DA's office. “As you can see,” I went on, showing it to him as though I were putting it into evidence in court, “it has your signature on it.”

He didn't take it. His face wore the bland smile of a bureaucrat about to hide behind the rules. “You really ought to know I can't discuss a pending case,” he said smoothly. “You can ask me anything you like in court, but before that …” He raised his palms in a gesture that was meant to express rueful apology. His face, however, betrayed his satisfaction.

“Oh, I have plenty of questions to ask in court,” I answered brightly. “I just wonder whether you really want to wait to hear them—and whether you really want them asked in such a public forum.” I gazed at Pitt with what I hoped was a wealth of meaning.

“Some people,” Pitt replied, his voice hard underneath the ruminative tone, “might consider that a threat. But I don't think a smart lawyer would threaten a public official in his own office.” He shook his head. “It would be a very foolish thing to do, wouldn't it? So if that's what you're doing, Ms. Jameson”—his eyes were as hard as his voice—“I think you'd better leave before things get out of hand.”

“Things are already out of hand, Mr. Pitt,” I countered, my voice remarkably steady even if my hands weren't, which is why they got the job of holding onto my briefcase as though it were a life preserver. “They started getting out of hand when you started taking those manila envelopes from Ira Bellfield.”

I literally held my breath waiting for my bluff to be called. All Pitt had to do was throw me out—or worse, file a complaint against me with the bar association. What I was doing hadn't been covered in my legal ethics class.

“That's a pretty serious allegation,” Pitt replied, giving the word every one of its syllables. His face had lost none of its bland assurance. “I wonder,” he went on, his voice silky, “what could have put such a far-fetched notion into your head.”

I had won. The calm didn't matter. The smoothness was a defense. What was important was that he had neither denied the charge nor picked up the phone. He hadn't laughed either. He was playing for time, trying to find out just how much I had. My move: to convince him I had more than I really did.

“Ira Bellfield has a lot of fires,” I said conversationally. “Of course, you'll say that he owns a lot of buildings and that some of them are in bad neighborhoods and that some of his tenants aren't sober all the time, so it's no wonder he has fires. But there are a couple of reports in here”—I tapped the briefcase significantly—“that could make you look really bad in court.” What I didn't mention was the astronomical odds against my actually being able to introduce into evidence at Tito's trial fire marshal's reports from unrelated fires. “Irrelevant, incompetent, and immaterial” about summed it up. My heart thumped, and I remembered an argument I'd forgotten to use against Riordan when he'd suggested running the bluff. I hated poker.

“Take 1309 Bedford Avenue,” I continued when the silence convinced me he wasn't going to rush into guilty explanations. “You call it a gas leak fire. Would you be interested to learn that the Brooklyn Union Gas Company cut off service for nonpayment the week before the fire?”

“People in the ghetto,” Pitt answered with a crocodile smile, “have been known to supply their own gas when the regular service runs out. It's a dangerous practice.” He shook his head mournfully, but the twinkle in his eye told me he liked poker a hell of a lot more than I did—and probably played it better. “These poor tenants learned that the hard way.”

“What about 2718 Herkimer?” I shot back. “Do most fires started by winos have two points of origin and use accelerants? Doesn't that pattern say ‘torch' loud and clear? And yet you blame the fire on a drunk who was sleeping it off in a vacant apartment.”