Hostile Witness Part 58

"Then let him go."

"I can't, Mrs. Moore, without evidence. Right now, as it stands, I believe I'm going to convict him of first degree murder."

"I'm sorry, Mr. Carl. I am so sorry."

"So am I," I said, reaching for my briefcase. "Sorrier than you can know."

I placed the briefcase on my lap, bullet hole side up. It was a brown leather number, with thick strips binding the edges, a Hartmann, one of the finest cases made. It was a gift, from my uncle Sammy, a message of his faith in my future. It was a solid briefcase, the briefcase of a successful lawyer. I used to like heaving it around, as if the accoutrements could define the man. Now it embarra.s.sed me. All the more for what it contained. I freed the leather straps guarding the latches and opened the case. From inside I pulled out a manila envelope. Carefully I closed the case and placed it on the rug beside the couch and unfastened the metal clasp holding the envelope shut. Then I brought out the photographs.

Morris had had them taken for me. He had complained about the a.s.signment. "I don't do such stuff, prowling with a camera in the dead of night," he said. "I am an investigator, not a piece of dreck." But when I told him what it was all about and how a man's life might depend on those photographs, and how I was out of town in Corpus Christi and couldn't do it myself, he relented. "There might be nothing, you know that, Victor, nothing at all." I told him I knew that, but that I had a hunch. "You and your hunches, where have your hunches gotten you, mine freint. Take my advice, and keep your hunches away from the racetrack and maybe you won't die a beggar." Of course he had not taken the photographs himself, as he might have been recognized, but he gave the a.s.signment to Sheldon. "All the stuff he has," said Morris. "These fancy-schmancy cameras, lenses like telescopes, special meters like from NASA, special filters, special film, a regular Eisenstadt. So tell me, Victor, why when it's time for a picture of me and mine wife, the heads he cuts off like an executioner." But in these photographs, Sheldon had not cut off the heads.

I placed the first on the coffee table, facing Leslie.

It was a high-resolution black-and-white photograph from inside one of the terminals still under renovation at the Philadelphia International Airport. Gate D5, a United Airlines gate, where two attendants were taking tickets at the counter and handing out seat a.s.signments. On the board was listed Flight 595 to Chicago, leaving 4:55 P.M. In front of the counter, posing for the photographer, was a man holding up a copy of the Daily News. The headline running the entire length of the page read, "EAGLES SACK PACK," touting the Eagles' great surge to .500 on the preceding Sunday.

"This was taken Monday at the airport," I said.

"And?" asked Leslie.

Sloc.u.m too was looking at me, wondering what I was doing.

The next picture was of the same counter, with the same attendants. To the side of the counter was a barrel-chested man in a belted raincoat, a garment bag hanging by a long strap from his shoulder. The man was Jimmy Moore.

"This is the flight he took Monday," I said, "to get him to Chicago for the first day of the conference."

"That's right," said Leslie. "He called me from the airport to say good-bye. To say he loved me and missed me already."

"Yes, I'm not surprised," I said, showing her the next photograph.

It was a wide-angle shot of the same terminal, the counter now on the right and Jimmy sitting on a chair in the waiting lounge, talking on his cellular phone.

"I don't understand your point, Mr. Carl," she said.

"I want you to look at the counter, Mrs. Moore. Do you see the woman there, in the heavy overcoat, with her back to us, getting ticketed?"

"And?"

I showed her the next picture. An announcement had been made and the first-cla.s.s pa.s.sengers had been asked to board. Jimmy was handing his ticket to an attendant at the mouth of the ramp. The woman in the overcoat was still getting ticketed at the counter.

Without saying anything I placed the next photograph before her. The corners of the prior photographs peeked out from the edges of the latest. Jimmy Moore had boarded, he was no longer in the photograph. The woman at the counter had received her seat a.s.signment and boarding pa.s.s and had turned to leave the counter. Just as she was leaving the counter she had taken a glance behind her, looking left over her shoulder and the moment of that glance was when Sheldon had snapped the shutter. Her face was clearly visible in the photograph. It was Veronica Ashland.

I couldn't bear to look at Mrs. Moore as she examined that photograph. I heard her breathing, soft and steady, and the sc.r.a.pe of teeth.

I took out the last photograph and placed it atop the picture with Veronica's face. In this final photograph Veronica, her back again turned to us, was handing her boarding pa.s.s to the attendant at the mouth of the gate.

"It could be a coincidence," said Leslie, her voice as weak as a whisper.

"Yes, it could," I said.

I reached for the photographs to place them back in the envelope, but she tapped my wrist and I let my hand drop. She pulled out the next to last photograph and stared at it, stared at the beautiful face glancing over her left shoulder, soft hair, rounded, gentle nose, limpid eyes wide and scared, as if their owner could feel the camera capturing her image.

"You are despicable, Mr. Carl," said Leslie Moore, and she was absolutely right.

When I had pulled this selfsame trick on Winston Osbourne at that deposition of his wife I had thought myself a very clever young man. In those heady days of my still aspiring youth I viewed myself incapable of the fatal folly and thus felt morally justified to present the bill to others. But I could feel no such justification now. How could I accuse Jimmy Moore of moral failure in continuing on with Veronica Ashland when I had hung my coat and my ethics on a post outside that very same door? And how could I blithely ever sit across the table and inflict the pain I was inflicting when I now knew exactly what that pain felt like? To see that photograph of Veronica, with whom, in my seemingly infinite capacity for self-delusion, I had still hoped for some future, to see Veronica checking onto that plane to continue her affair with the murderous Jimmy Moore was almost more than I could bear. And finally, how could I ever again muster the self-righteousness needed to present the fruits of another's folly when I had been guilty of a folly so grand as to send a man to prison and possibly to death? I was despicable and the photographs I had brought would have stained my hands with their sordidness if I hadn't felt so sordid already.

But there was a difference between my exposure of Tiffany LeGrand to Mrs. Osbourne and the exposure of the continuing relations.h.i.+p between Jimmy and Veronica to Mrs. Moore. I had exposed the exotic existence of Ms. LeGrand, destroyed a marriage, destroyed a man, spread pain and disillusionment, for money. I wouldn't do that again, I swore, not for mere riches, I swore, though all the time I was swearing I knew that mammon has its power over all of us. The photographs I had brought to Mrs. Moore were not about money, they were about a man's life, an innocent man in jail facing death, a man whom I had failed, and so, though I knew I was stooping, I would stoop as low as I was able. I had no more pride left, no more false notions of self-importance. I would crawl on my belly like a reptile if it would save Chester Concannon, and crawling I was.

By the time Renee had returned Leslie had fled the room, her thin writhing hands clutched around her neck.

"Where's Leslie gone off to now?" said a slurring Renee, with a half-empty highball gla.s.s in her hand.

"I don't know exactly," I said. "She told us to wait."

Renee looked at me and then at Sloc.u.m and then she spied the photographs still piled on the coffee table. She stepped over and sat down and went through them one by one, in reverse order, like watching a horror movie backwards.

"You b.a.s.t.a.r.ds," she said. "You G.o.dd.a.m.n b.a.s.t.a.r.ds." She stood up. "I won't let you get away with it."

As she was leaving the room Sloc.u.m said in his calm voice, "You know what obstruction of justice is, ma'am?"

She stopped and turned to stare at him.

"About five years is what it is," he said.

Before she could respond Leslie had come back into the room, clutching a crumpled brown paper bag. Her eyes were red, her face puffy from her tears so that her sharp cheekbones had softened. She threw the bag into my chest.

"Take it and go," she said.

I looked inside. It was a white s.h.i.+rt, crusted and torn, splattered with the dark maroon of dried blood. On the sleeve was embroidered JDM.

We took it and went.

"We'll send the s.h.i.+rt over to the lab," said Sloc.u.m as he let me out of the car outside my apartment. "Check out the blood. I'll let you know in a few days whether there's a match with Bissonette."

"It will match," I said. "Down to the last guanine rung of the DNA ladder."

"Even so, Concannon will still end up serving most of his federal time."

"I know," I said. "And between you and me, his fund-raising was more extortion than anything else, so it's not totally undeserved. But he shouldn't die for killing a man he didn't kill."

We looked at each other for a moment. "You did good tonight, Carl," said Sloc.u.m.

"Then how come I don't feel good?"

"You didn't tell that lady anything she didn't already know."

I shrugged sadly and headed up the steps to my building. Sloc.u.m was waiting for me to go inside, as if he were dropping off a baby-sitter. I opened the door to my vestibule and waved him away. The Chevette ground its gears and pulled off into the night.

When I turned to enter the vestibule Winston Osbourne was standing there before me, like the ghost of all my past transgressions.

"Victor. I've been waiting so long for you."

He was shaking with a ferocious chill, his hands jammed into his raincoat, his sallow, hollowed face staring at me, c.o.c.ked at a crazed angle.

"Victor," he said in his shaky, lockjawed Brahmin voice. "I've come for my car. Give me back my car."

"Mr. Osbourne, Winston," I said once my nerves had settled from the surprise. "I'm glad to see you, actually. I have good news for you."

"Give me back my car."

I closed my eyes in sadness. "I'm sorry, Mr. Osbourne. It's been sold already. But the good news is that I've talked everything over with Mr. Sussman and he's willing to forgive the rest of your debt. I have to sign a few papers and satisfy the judgments on you, but then you'll be perfectly free to start over again."

"But where am I to go, Victor? How can I get from point A to point B without my father's car? It is a straight line, yes, a direct route, but I need my car to get there. What would you have me do, Victor?"

"There's always the subway."

"Don't mock me."

"I'm sorry, Mr. Osbourne. I truly am, more than you know. You look cold, not well. Come on upstairs and I'll make you some tea if you want. But with regard to your finances, there is nothing more I can do for you."

"You can give me back my car."

"I can't do that, it's been sold already and the new owners have good t.i.tle under the law."

"Then you can waltz with me, Victor," he said and he pulled out a small, s.h.i.+ny automatic pistol from the pocket of his raincoat.

I stared at the pistol for a moment, the gun shaking wildly in his palsied hand, his opaque, striated fingernails grown even longer than I remembered. I was transfixed by the pistol until all the fear seemed to bleed out of me. I raised my head and looked into his eyes. They were sallow, shot through with lightning streaks of blood. They darted back and forth, as uncontrolled as his hand. Then I couldn't help myself. I started laughing.

While I had been feeling sorry for him he had been shooting at me. No wonder he missed, his hand shaking like that, uncontrollable, wild. It was too pathetic for me to even have considered before. But at the same time I realized there was a purer justice at work here than I could have fathomed. I should have realized long before that if I were to be killed it would not be the Jimmy Moores or the Enrico Raffaellos or even the Norvel Goodwins who would do the killing. It would be the scion of the Osbournes, the grandly Protestant, socially registered Osbournes, who would do me in. With a silver bullet, no doubt, for how else do you kill a Jew? And I deserved it, too, for the temerity to even consider joining their club. Here was Winston Osbourne, with his little pistol and his silver bullet, out to finish that dream forever, as if it could have survived my failures, as if I even wanted it anymore, as if it ever had worth. So I laughed, hard and loud. I threw my head back and laughed at everything I had ever wished for, ever wanted, all my deepest, shallowest desires. I stepped back and leaned against the wall of mailboxes and laughed.

It felt good, too, until he shot me.

59.

THE GOOD NEWS, I suppose, is that it didn't kill me.

The bad news is that it really hurt a lot.

The bullet went into my chest just below my right shoulder and smashed through a few underdeveloped muscles, including the pectoralis minor, the name of which I considered an insult and tried to convince the doctor to change to something like pectoralis mucho grande, though she didn't seem amused. After it ripped through my pectoralis mucho grande the bullet hit a rib, bounced around a bit, and clipped off a piece of my right lung. That would explain the sucking sound I heard as I slid down the wall of the vestibule; it was air seeping out of my lung, causing a condition called pneumothorax. What happened then is that my lung filled with blood. That was like drowning in ten feet of water without needing goggles to see the world slipping away.

Winston Osbourne could have finished me off right there. I was not one of those heroes who, with a chest full of lead, was ready to fight his way out of a jam. One little .38 slug and I was slumped on the floor of the vestibule in shock, bleeding, breathing the sharp smell of saltpeter into my remaining operative lung, waiting to be finished off. But for some reason, maybe the tremendous report of the shot ringing in that tiny vestibule or the sight of me sliding down the wall with a bullet in my chest or the blood and urine pooling around me, I never knew, but for some reason after that first shot he ran.

I was found by one of the older divorced women who lived in my building, coming down the stairs, c.o.c.ked forward at the waist with caution, a broom in her hand held like a baseball bat, investigating the gunshot. It was nice of her to call the ambulance and save my life, but I would have preferred if she hadn't screamed so loudly when she discovered me lying there. I jerked involuntarily at the sound and that hurt as much as the gunshot itself.

Have I mentioned that I don't do well with pain?

The pathetic history of my life didn't pa.s.s before my eyes as I lay in that vestibule. That treat waited until I was in Graduate Hospital, out of intensive care, ready to receive a seemingly endless stream of visitors. The shooting was in the paper, front page of the Daily News, "CONCANNON LAWYER BLASTED AGAIN," and so they came, one after the other, old friends from high school, old lovers, my ex-fiancee Julie, who is now unhappily married to a proctologist, yes there is a G.o.d, lawyers with whom I had tangled in court, law school cla.s.smates who had achieved a success I couldn't match, Rita, Vimhoff, Ellie, Guthrie that b.a.s.t.a.r.d, Lauren, Dominic and Jasper and Virgil, trundling in loudly together like the Three Stooges, Saltz, Lefkowitz, Judge Gimbel, Sloc.u.m, even the mayor, with television cameras in tow.

Beth came every day after work and sat by my bed during visiting hours. She was there when my test results for HIV came back negative and we each raised a urine-colored apple juice in grat.i.tude to whatever angel had been looking out for me. We talked about the Saltz case, and how much money we'd earn, and then we talked about how, after my debacle in the Concannon case, I'd never get another client. I had a rich dim future ahead of me, which, as I lay in that bed, fighting off an infection in my chest, pus draining like curdled milk from a tube running out of my side, didn't seem so bad. She visited as regularly as a relative, Beth did, which was nice of her since my mother decided not to come in from Arizona, seeing that I survived and all, though she a.s.sured me in the letter that she would have dropped everything for my funeral. My father visited only now and then to grumble.

"What's that you got there?" he said, pointing to a large book that lay on my bed table.

"A get-well gift from a friend," I said. "Someone who knew Grandpop. It's the first book of the Talmud."

"Who the h.e.l.l would give you something like that?"

"He's a private investigator. He thought it would be good for me. The start of my education. I might like it, who knows? It's mostly translated into English, though there's still some Hebrew, and your favorite language, Aramaic."

"My father wasted his time on that c.r.a.p."

"Really?"

"I remember he read it every Sat.u.r.day and then, when he was already in his sixties, he finished the last book and threw a party. A lot of smelly old men smoking cigars and farting."

"What did he do on Sat.u.r.days after he finished?"

"He started over again, volume one, from the very first words."

So that's what I did in the hospital, I read Morris's Talmud, starting, like my grandfather, at volume one. There was a section in Hebrew in the middle and then a translation with commentaries surrounding it, all in English except for those from some guy Ras.h.i.+, who wrote in his own alphabet that they didn't bother to translate. It was all about property and contracts and torts, like the first year of law school, except it was different in a strange soulful way. The first section was about a piece of cloth claimed by two men. Cut it in half, the book said. Sounded right to me.

In my first week back at Derringer and Carl I had a visitor, a Michael Tombelli from down on Two Street in South Philly. He was a dark young man with a scary smile and thick belly. He sat down across from me with a sneer, leaned back, and put his feet on my desk.

"I got a little problem, Vic."

"Call me Mr. Carl, Michael," I said. "And take your feet off my desk."

"Sure thing," he said with his smile as his feet dropped loudly. "A couple days ago I get stopped by the cops on Oregon Avenue."

"Were you speeding?"

"Sort of."

"Pay the fine," I advised.

"Yeah, right, well, I would, sure, but then they tell me the car is stolen."

"Imagine that."

"You borrow a car from a friend and look what happens."

"So you're up for grand theft auto, is that the story?"

"And they find a gun in the trunk."