In This Rain (8 page)

Ford held his arms open a few seconds longer, then dropped them.

“You want my pulpit next week, you can have it,” said Ray. “Now sit down.”

Ford did.

“Go ahead. Tell me just who it is we’re seeing tomorrow,” Ray said, “what you think is gonna happen and what you want from me. And be succinct, son. We got a lot of work to do here, and neither of us got all day. I got parishioners to see. And you got a building full of children you got to keep off the roof.”

Heart’s Content

Someone died, Ann had said. But someone’s always dying.

*

Joe had never had an arrangement with Dolan Construction, that tie of callousness and greed the prosecutor painted for the jury.

A relationship, that was true. Joe had run across Dolan three times before. Before what became known as the Moss case, though the case Joe was working was about nailing Larry Manelli, had nothing to do with seven-year-old Ashley Moss until she’d gone skipping down the sidewalk on a rainy day.

The guys at Dolan Construction had been a dirty little bunch. But they were small-time; they were punks. They hired nonunion, they built with shoddy materials, their night security was one ancient wino snoring in a shed. Dolan Construction paid off everybody they could find so they could avoid doing anything they were supposed to do. Joe knew all that but it wasn’t his problem.

Larry Manelli was his problem.

Manelli was a Buildings Department inspector. Since the world began, bums like the Dolan crowd had infested the construction industry like roaches in the walls. In New York, it was the job of Buildings Department inspectors to keep them under control. Like the roaches, you could never completely eliminate them. But you could make their lives difficult, you could prevent them from flourishing. And if a roach colony lost all fear and all caution, if they began operating brazenly in the light, you could stamp them out.

Or you could become one of them. A giant swollen cockroach king, growing fat on bribes and kickbacks deposited at your feet by all the other busy little bugs.

Three years ago Larry Manelli had been on his way to becoming that kind of vermin royalty, and Joe Cole had been out to stomp him.

Joe knew the Dolan Construction site was a station along Larry Manelli’s route, and he knew it wasn’t a major one. Manelli had his everyday circuit, a bottle of whiskey here, Knicks tickets there, grease so small it didn’t matter because what the giver got in return was sure to be small, too. Joe wasn’t interested in nailing Manelli on penny-ante stuff. The biggest dance on Manelli’s card was a huge commercial project near the Brooklyn Bridge. Joe knew Manelli was raking it in down there, trading big favors, sticking out both hands and squeezing his eyes shut. That site was Joe’s target.

Knew how?

From hours, days, weeks of meticulous investigation.

And because Sonny O’Doul, one of the roaches at Dolan, had told him.

Not out of the blue. Joe had backed Sonny into a carefully built corner. But once he’d seen the trap he was in, Sonny hadn’t fought it. A smart man, Sonny, and he’d done the quick calculus: maximize profit, minimize loss, save your own ass, and stick someone else to the flypaper as fast as you can.

Joe had known he would. So predictable, the insect world.

One blustery November morning, his facts, figures, and hidden-camera photos in a folder in his backpack (you can’t climb a scaffold with a briefcase), Joe strolled unhurriedly onto the Dolan site, watched by the cold, appraising stares of men who didn’t know him and the tight-lipped hostility of the ones who, from this job or some other, did. Sonny O’Doul double-timed out of his trailer. He hustled Joe inside before word of his arrival could spread.

“The fuck you trying to do to me, Cole?” Sonny banged the door shut, dropped himself behind the paper-drifts that engulfed his desk.

“How’re things, Sonny?” Uninvited, Joe sat in the opposite chair.

“Like you give a fuck. Every time you show your ugly Yid face on a jobsite, six guys disappear in case you catch them at shit I don’t even know they’re doing. Last job you cost me my bonus, asshole.”

“Come on, Sonny, it’s not like you needed it. On kickbacks alone, you ought to be getting rich.”

“Cocksucker. You have a warrant, show me. Otherwise, get off my job.”

“I don’t know. I thought I’d take a look around.”

“Listen, Cole: I’m three days behind from the rain last week. I can’t afford this shit.”

Meaning: How much will it cost me to get you to leave?

“I’m tired of being indoors. All this rain, you know? Seems like this might be a good day to hang around outside, shoot the shit with your men.”

Meaning: Trying to buy me, that was a mistake, Sonny.

“This is fucking harassment, Cole. I’m gonna call my lawyer.”

“That might be a good idea.”

Joe reached for his pack, pulled out a thick folder labeled “Dolan/ Manelli,” and flipped it to Sonny. He left Sonny and the folder alone together while he ambled to the other end of the trailer, poured a cup of coffee, and took it outside. He stood beside a puddle, gazing at geometric lines of scaffolding against gray sky.

“Your coffee stinks,” he told Sonny when he returned.

“What do you want? Shut the door.” Sonny slapped the folder down.

“A decaf latte?”

“Oh, fuck your mother, Cole, don’t play— ”

“I want Larry Manelli.”

Sonny glared at the folder as though his smoldering hate could ignite it, then raised that look to Joe. “Seems to me you’ve already got his ass in a sling.”

“I do. You. You’re the sling, Sonny.”

“So why are you here? This your victory lap?”

“No. Your chance.”

“To do what?”

Joe gave Sonny time to see if he could figure a way out. But the folder was a roach motel; there was no way out.

Sonny asked, “How?”

“This crap”— Joe cocked a finger at the file folder— “is so small-time, I don’t know why you bother.” He held up a hand to fend off Sonny’s answer. “And I don’t care. Don’t get me confused with someone who gives a shit about you, Sonny, or this won’t play out well.”

“So what the— ”

“If I give this amateur-hour junk to the DA, you and Manelli will do sixteen months apiece. For a double-dipping shit like Manelli, that’s not nearly enough. For you, Sonny— well, like I said, I don’t really care. You following me?”

With obvious effort Sonny kept his mouth shut.

“If Manelli got more,” Joe said, “that would be better. If Manelli got a long time, and you got a slap on the wrist, wouldn’t that be the best?”

Sonny O’Doul knew everything there was to know about the Brooklyn Bridge site and he gave it all to Joe. Joe took it in notes, not on tape: that was part of the deal. If he could bag Larry Manelli by squeezing the people Sonny was pointing him to, he’d leave Sonny and his low-grade crap alone.

“As long as you clean up your act, Sonny. Because the next time your name shows up on my desk— you know I can smell it before I see it, your name?— you’re toast.”

“Fuck you.”

“Uh-huh. Go back to the stuff about the property line.”

A couple of hours, that was all it took. Joe kept his eyes on Sonny, asked short questions to clarify points. Eventually Sonny slowed and stopped, like an out-of-gas car coasting into a stall. Joe closed his notebook, slung his pack over his shoulder. “You can keep the file,” he said, knowing that Sonny would now have to spend the day worrying about where to hide it and the drive home searching for a place to ditch it. “I have a copy.”

And then, standing in the open doorway, just before he left, he said, “And do something about that for-shit shoring, Sonny. I know you hate to waste the good money you’re paying Manelli to not see it. But fix it. All this rain, more coming tomorrow, something’s bound to give. Someone could get killed.”

Heart’s Content

During the trial Joe’s lawyer had told him he didn’t look sorry enough.

“But it wasn’t his fault. Why should he look sorry?” Ellie had defended Joe stoutly, a loyal wife, a believer to the end. Past the end, or so she claimed: a believer still. Though she’d divorced him and was “moving on.”

“Because when a child dies everyone’s supposed to be sorry,” Joe’s lawyer told her. “Whether it’s your fault or not.”

There wasn’t much Joe could do about it, though. He couldn’t manufacture tears, or a look of public sadness, not even the agitated position-shifting of anguish and regret. Through the trial’s four days he sat, his body still (not calm, but looking calm, he knew), his shadowed eyes darting from speaker to speaker (prosecutor, witness, judge) with an intensity he couldn’t control, a sharpness that made people flinch.

“It’s a Manhattan jury, Joe, look at them! Everyone who isn’t black is some kind of white liberal, except the Irish guy who’s probably pissed off at you about O’Doul and the Korean woman who probably doesn’t give a shit. Ashley was a cute little black kid, you’re a college-boy Jew. Her father’s a bus driver, you own a house, in Riverdale yet. Joe, you gotta give me something to work with.”

If that’s the way it is, Joe thought, maybe I should have hired a black lawyer instead of you, Feinberg.

But he still said nothing, because he knew what his lawyer meant.

He didn’t look sorry.

But he was sorry.

Sorrow was a part of him now, a stone in his gut, poison in his veins. Not guilty of the crime of which he stood accused— taking graft from Sonny O’Doul— he was unmistakably guilty of something else: an arrogance that had said the crusade he was on, the capture of the archvillain Larry Manelli, was of overriding importance. Other problems could be tossed away, left littering the roadside like debris from a glorious parade for others to clean up after he, in victory, was gone.

Like the blood-spattered debris littering a downtown sidewalk after a shoring collapse. Shoring he’d cavalierly told Sonny O’Doul to repair, and then put out of his mind, gave not one further thought to, until the evening news reports and the ring of his phone.

Manelli and O’Doul, in separate deals, had both pled guilty to bribery, Manelli for demanding bribes, O’Doul for paying them. The pair also pled to reckless endangerment, and Manelli additionally to misuse of public funds (he solicited his payoffs while on the clock), harassment (once, when O’Doul’s horse at Belmont beat Manelli’s by a length, Manelli had said, “You fucking mick bastard, I’ll cut your balls off”), and theft (Buildings Department markers, pads, pens, and tape were found at his Long Island home). Manelli was sentenced to varying lengths of prison time on the various counts, to be served, because of the bargain, simultaneously instead of consecutively. O’Doul was sentenced to far less time because, though no one but he himself denied he was a slimy sleazeball, O’Doul, as a private citizen, hadn’t violated the public trust.

And because he was willing to roll over. Talking freely and fast, he provided as much evidence as the prosecutor could have hoped for against Larry Manelli. In return, he got a sentence shaved as close to the minimum as his lawyer could contrive.

And also because he offered as a bonus and without being asked, evidence against that other accused violator of the public trust, Joe Cole.

*

“Is any of O’Doul’s shit true?” Feinberg, at one of the endless meetings in his office before the trial began, jabbed his thumb toward the box of tapes and transcripts his discovery motion had produced.

“No.”

Feinberg chewed on his lip. “Then why is he saying it, Joe?”

Kenneth Feinberg was a fat, sloppy man, as careless and disorganized in appearance as he was meticulous and assiduous in process. He’d requested tapes of O’Doul’s statements in addition to transcripts so the stutters, pauses, and throat-clearing of mendacity might reveal themselves. His strategy would be to pounce on these tiny knots in the thread and, by worrying them with the razor-sharp teeth of punctiliousness (for which his targets were never prepared, coming as it did from a man whose tie was perpetually crooked, his suit unkempt, his aspect preoccupied), try to unravel the fabric.

Joe said, “O’Doul hates me.”

“Why does he hate you?”

“I was a son of a bitch to him.”

“Why were you a son of a bitch?”

“Because he’s a lying shit.”

“And you liked to see him squirm.”

“Standard investigative technique.”

“Being a son of a bitch?”

“Squeezing people close to your target until they give him up.”

“You enjoyed it?”

Joe wanted to be able to deny that, but what would be the point of lying to his lawyer? “So what?”

“Just asking.” Feinberg rapped his knuckles on the transcript box. “So it’s payback time. Okay, you never took a bribe. But O’Doul offered?”

“He tried to buy me off every time he saw me.”

“Over, what, eight years you knew him, right?”

“It pissed him off that I turned him down. Called me a self-righteous kike.”

“I don’t suppose you have that on tape? Wrote it down, made a note?”

“Come on, Ken. My department is IAD for the whole city. If I made a note every time someone called me a name— ”

“Yeah, okay.” Feinberg waved that away. “You never took anything from him?”

“After he said that, I wouldn’t have taken anything from him if I had been in the market.”

“O’Doul says you did.”

“No.”

“You sure?”

“For God’s sake! Does that sound like something I’d forget?”

“I gotta ask. A beer, Yankee tickets, nothing? If there ever was anything, anything, Joe, you better tell me. It’ll come back and bite us in the ass.”

“Coffee. I used to drink a cup of coffee in his trailer.”

“That’s it?”

“Tasted like shit, too.”

“Oh, well, if it tasted like shit. We can get around that, then.”

But they got around nothing. Sonny O’Doul perjured himself, lied with great abandon, bore false witness with ease. He repeated on the stand the same fictions he’d offered up around the DA’s conference table, and if the jury saw the loathing and the triumph in his eyes each time he regarded Joe Cole across the courtroom, they listened intently to his words nonetheless.