Mean Streak (5 page)

A thing. Yes, that was what you called it when it wasn't love and it wasn't exactly an affair either. A friendship with extras, I'd called our relationship when I tried to describe it. A friendship with bed privileges. A thing.

And now it was over.

Or was it?

“That has nothing to do with my representing him,” I said firmly, hoping to hell I was telling the truth. “I can't stand the way they're all ganging up on him. This is part of the war against the defense bar,” I went on. “If Lazarus has his way, every defense lawyer who's any good will find himself facing indictment on something or other.”

“Cass, come on,” my friend remonstrated, the effect only slightly spoiled by a mouthful of black beans, “you can't really believe the only reason Matt Riordan is facing indictment is that Lazarus has a vendetta against him. He's played fast and loose with the system for a long time—and you're running a risk of being tarred with the same brush if you take his case.”

“Oh, that's nice,” I shot back. “You mean I'm supposed to stand back and let Riordan get railroaded so I can keep my skirts clean? This does not sound like the Lani Rasmussen I used to know.”

Lani finished her burrito and took a swig of soda. It caught in her throat, producing an unladylike burp. She laughed. “Why did you take this case, anyway?” she asked.

This was a question to which I'd given a lot of thought since I'd sat across from my client at Tre Scalini. And all the reasons I'd come up with really boiled down to one.

“Have you ever heard of a place called Cedar Point?” I asked. Lani shook her head. “It's a big amusement park in Sandusky, Ohio,” I explained. “We used to go there every summer when I was a kid. My brother, Ron, and I would ride the roller coaster, a big old wooden thing called the Blue Streak.” I leaned back on the picnic table and cupped my knee in my hand.

“We thought that roller coaster was the scariest thing in the world,” I said, letting reminiscence wash over me. “We'd sit in the front car and scream bloody murder when the coaster went around curves. Sometimes it felt as if all the cars were going to run right off the tracks and land us in Lake Erie. We loved the thing.”

“What's this got to do with—”

“Patience,” I said, holding up a restraining hand. “I outgrew Cedar Point for a while,” I went on. “But then I went with a bunch of college friends one summer. I couldn't wait to show them the Blue Streak. Only a funny thing happened—they'd built a new roller coaster, bigger and faster and scarier. They called it the Mean Streak.”

I smiled at the memory. Next to the Mean Streak, the old Blue Streak was a kiddie ride. Or so I bragged to my friends as I made my way to the front car of the big new roller coaster.

“I thought I was going to die,” I told Lani, recounting my first trip. “By the time it was over, I was sobbing with terror and relief. The Mean Streak had lived up to its name.”

Brooklyn state court, where I knew all the plunges, all the curves, all the acceleration points, was the old Blue Streak. The Southern District, the federal court, was the Mean Streak. It was bigger, scarier, with curves I didn't anticipate, speeds I might not be ready for. But I had to try it. I couldn't spend my life on the kiddie rides, afraid to test myself on the big one. I explained this as best I could to Lani, and then we sat in silence, a silence I broke by asking, “What else have they got on Riordan?”

“Word on the street is that Fat Jack is on tape telling Eddie Fitz the money came directly from Matt Riordan.”

Tape. They had a tape. Maybe tapes plural.

“Is Riordan himself on tape?” I tried to keep my voice neutral, but the panic edged through. Lani's smile was one part pity, two parts innocent malice.

“I hear your client's golden voice is on at least two of the tapes,” she replied. “But the bulk of their case is Eddie Fitz and Fat Jack.”

My defense jelled as I sat across from my old buddy. I saw myself at counsel table, flanked on one side by Matt Riordan—and on the other by the slimeball known on the street as Fat Jack.

Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, the evidence is clear that Jack Vance, known for obvious reasons as Fat Jack, knowingly and deliberately paid money to a corrupt court clerk in return for grand jury minutes. This was a crime. This was wrong
.

And we have Fat Jack's word
—
and only Fat Jack's word, ladies and gentlemen, because Eddie Fitzgerald was only repeating the words Fat Jack said to him
—
that the money came from Matt Riordan
.

It would be a mudslinging contest between Fat Jack and Matt Riordan—and there was little doubt in my mind that the jury would have no trouble choosing which man to trust.

Our whole defense would depend upon the fat man sitting next to Matt.

I could handle this, I decided; the Mean Streak wasn't as scary as it looked.

C
HAPTER
T
HREE

“You
said
there wouldn't be a little black suit,” I protested through clenched teeth. “You
said
I could be myself.”

“I forgot that your idea of dressing for success is a hand-sewn Afghan smock from the Daily Planet catalogue,” Riordan replied with a wry smile. He sat on a red plush stool; I stood before a beveled three-way mirror in my stocking feet. An Ann Taylor suit in a deep charcoal with faint chalk stripes hung from my frame like a burlap sack.

“It's too boxy,” I said. My voice held exactly the same shade of sullen resentment I'd used at age ten when shopping at Horne's with my mother.

“True,” Riordan agreed in a cheerful tone that steadfastly refused to acknowledge my mood. “A woman in a suit should always look as if she's not wearing anything underneath. There should be a provocative little hint of cross-dressing, of feminine charms hidden under a deceptively masculine wrapping.”

“When the hell did you start writing for
Women's Wear Daily
?” I shot back. I felt like a fool. Worse, I felt like Julia Roberts in
Pretty Woman
, like Eliza Doolittle, like the original Galatea, like every woman who has ever let a man dictate to her how she should present herself. Riordan had hired a lawyer, not a mannequin, and it was about time I—

“Everything counts,” my client said in a low voice. The testiness in his tone was overlaid by an intense conviction. As much as Matt Riordan was capable of speaking directly from the heart, he was speaking that way now. “I know you think it's enough to know the law, to be quick on your feet, to care about your cases. But when I say everything counts, I mean everything, including physical appearance. And yours,” he went on, “could stand a little improvement. More Manhattan, less Brooklyn. More Wall Street, less Legal Aid.”

“More Jane Pauley, less me,” I muttered. But the sullen edge left my voice; I was just bantering now.

Everything counts
. That was Riordan in a nutshell. His own appearance was a matter of constant, meticulous concern. I'd given him a tie one Christmas; he'd never worn it, and when I asked why, he told me. At length. He was only doing to me what he'd always done to himself.

“Just try on the next suit,” Riordan begged. “I think the amethyst raw silk has possibilities.”

It did. Believe it or not, I looked great in the thing. It had a peplum and a rounded forties collar with rhinestone clips. Very period, nipped at the waist with a straight skirt that ended just above the knees. Short enough to show leg; long enough for a woman who hadn't worn a miniskirt since the last time they were in style.

Pearl-gray pumps, gray hose with just a touch of lavender, silver earrings, and a haircut that cost more than my last year's entire beauty shop budget—and I was finally ready for prime time.

We grabbed a cappuccino at a little place on Madison Avenue. I had six shopping bags filled with silk items, two shoe bags holding Louis Jourdan pumps, and a wardrobe of scarves in colors like eggplant and teal. I was also under orders to wear only my most conservative, absolutely real jewelry. No craft fair finds in hammered silver, no handmade Navajo turquoise, no images of animals.

I had appointments for a facial, a leg waxing, and a manicure. Was I preparing to try a case or enter the Miss America contest? I absentmindedly raised a hand to my hair, intending to run my fingers through it, but instead of the real thing, I now had a headful of doll hair, sprayed into plastic straw. I grimaced and lowered my hand.

Would Riordan have done the same—minus the leg waxing—if he'd hired a male lawyer? Looking at his razor-cut hair, well-groomed nails, and impeccable wardrobe, I knew the answer: He sure as hell would. And that, somehow, made it all right.

Halfway through my first cup of the foamy, caffeine-laden brew, Matt began to talk about his father. I was so surprised, I put the cup down onto the saucer with an audible clatter and stared at my companion. He had never, but never, mentioned his parents or his childhood to me in all the years we'd been together.

“We were living in Hell's Kitchen back then,” he said. “In those days, wives didn't work unless their husbands were seriously deficient.”

I nodded; my own mother hadn't begun her career in real estate until both her children were in college.

“So we lived on my father's bus-driver salary,” he went on. “Which meant we were just a little bit poorer than some of the other people on the block, a little richer than others. My father used to lay bets with the bartender at the Shannon Bar and Grill over on Tenth Avenue. Never won much. Hell, he never won a damned thing, which was why my mother used to cry when he'd come home with half his paycheck riding on some broken-down nag out at Aqueduct. He'd always tell her that one day his horse would come in, and when it did, we could move out of the neighborhood and go to the Bronx, where things were good.”

I laughed aloud. The idea of the Bronx, the city's most dangerous borough, being a good place to raise kids was a concept totally new to me.

“Hey, don't laugh,” he protested, but the smile lines around his eyes forgave me. “In those days, moving to Parkchester was the best thing that could happen to an Irish family. My parents talked about the Bronx as if it were the Promised Land.”

It came to me that the reason Matt was talking to me about his family was that I was now his lawyer. What he'd kept hidden from his sometime girlfriend could be spoken about with his legal representative. We were closer as lawyer and client than we'd ever been as lovers.

“One day it happened. The horse he'd bet on came in first. Forty to one odds. He'd put down a thousand bucks, more than he'd ever bet before. He said it was because he had a tip from the jockey's second cousin's best friend, but who cared how it happened? The really important thing was that he'd won, that he was going to get forty thousand dollars and we were going to move to the Bronx.”

I happened to know Matt had never lived in the Bronx.

“Something went wrong,” I guessed. “What was it?”

“The bartender who took the bet worked for the Westies,” he said. “They were behind the whole betting operation. Not that we in the neighborhood ever called them Westies—that was a name the press made up. But forty thousand bucks was an amount they just couldn't see paying off on. They welshed on the bet, and when my father went to the Shannon to collect, they beat him up. Badly. He was in the hospital two weeks, and when he came home, he couldn't talk because his jaw was wired. The night he came home,” Matt went on, his own jaw clenching with remembered anger, “the very night, he had us pack up all our things and move out. We slunk out of the neighborhood like a bunch of thieves, as if he'd done something wrong. He didn't have what it took to stand up to them.”

“Didn't he go to the police?” I asked. “Not about the bet,” I clarified. “I know the cops couldn't have done anything to help him collect on an illegal bet. But beating someone up is a crime, right?”

“That's the part I could never forget,” Matt said. His smooth-as-silk voice grew ragged as he finished the tale. “Or forgive. The neighborhood cop, Tommy Mackay, stopped by and talked to my father. Told him, sure, he could file a complaint, but he went on to say that the cops couldn't protect him twenty-four hours a day, and maybe it would be better for all concerned if he made a complaint that a couple of niggers beat him up. That, by the way, was his precise wording: ‘a couple of niggers.' When Tommy knew what the whole neighborhood knew: that Pop was beaten up by the Westies because he'd dared to ask for his money from the bet. As we left the neighborhood that night, as all my clothes and toys went into a rented truck and we drove up Broadway to Inwood as if we'd done something wrong, I swore to God I'd never take that kind of shit in my own life. And I swore that I'd show cops like Tommy that they couldn't push people around like they pushed my father.”

I said nothing for a full minute, then quietly asked, “So you think Nick Lazarus is a little like Tommy the cop? Pushing people around just because he can?”

“I do,” my client replied. “And I'm counting on you to help me show him he can't. I'm not sneaking out of the neighborhood this time, no matter what the bullies try to do to me.”

We went to court two days later. Nick Lazarus had filed his indictment and Matt was charged with bribing a federal official.

We were mobbed on the way into the courthouse. The reporters and minicams behind the police barricades were waiting for me this time. No cameras were allowed inside the sacred precincts of the federal courthouse; they would have to garner their sound bites on the steps before trial began. Ginger Hsu of Channel Five thrust a mike into my face and asked, “What do you think your client's chances of acquittal are, Ms. Jameson?”

I mouthed a “No comment” and pushed past the crowd. I was almost at the top of the stairs when I felt a tug on my silk-clad sleeve. I turned; Matt had my arm. He stopped me and motioned toward the steps below us.