Mean Streak (7 page)

There had to be a deal. But how were we going to prove it?

I stepped out of the courtroom feeling almost as queasy as I had the first time I'd ridden the real Mean Streak.

Riordan maintained his coiled-spring cool until we jumped into a cab on Centre Street, and then he exploded.

“That fucking bastard,” he burst out, the consonants hitting the air with hard little sounds like a bullet fired through a silencer. “That unscrupulous scumbag, that—”

“I take it you're referring to Nick Lazarus,” I said mildly.

“He lets Jack cop a plea, then tries to sell the judge that there's no deal. Of course there's a deal, for God's sake. What does he think we are, stupid?”

“We've got three weeks to prove there's a deal,” I pointed out. “Three weeks to prepare our defense. Of course,” I went on, thinking aloud, “we could always ask for an adjournment if we can't—”

“No adjournments,” my client announced. “Adjournments are for losers.”

I shelved the discussion; it would only be important if we actually needed to put the case over. But Matt wouldn't let it go. He turned to me in the back seat of the cab and locked onto my eyes. “Lazarus will jump like a cougar on any sign of weakness,” he elaborated, “and I'm not going to give him anything he can jump on. He smells blood in the water, he'll be like a shark, taking bites out of us. So no adjournments no matter what. I don't care if the judge calls us tomorrow and wants to pick a jury at ten o'clock, we're ready. Got that?”

I nodded. The cab had snaked its way through traffic and was facing horn-honking gridlock at Canal Street. Crossing Canal during rush hour was like fording the Mississippi; it would take a good five minutes just to get through the intersection, and the Israeli cab driver would be leaning on the horn all the way. Conversation, however important, was no longer possible.

I leaned back in my seat and enjoyed the reprieve. It would last, I knew, only until we reached Riordan's midtown office. Then we'd resume my postgraduate course in federal criminal practice.

Ten minutes later, we took a right on Forty-second, and went around the block. The cabbie let us off in front of an imposing office building with rococo gold trim. The Helmsley Building, it was called, and its choicest offices had panoramic views of Park Avenue.

Matt paid the cabbie and I hopped out into the overheated air. I waited for him on the sidewalk, which was so hot it burned the soles of my feet through my thin shoes. I nodded at the doorman, who smiled broadly as he held open the gilded door. Riordan always got first-class service, thanks to the hefty tips he handed out at Christmas.

You entered Matt's office in three stages. First, the waiting room, with its Daumier legal prints on the wall, its dark green leather couch, its exotic flower arrangement with pale peach lilies and deep mauve chrysanthemums. Tasteful but not personal, a waiting room that deliberately said as little as possible about Riordan's true personality.

The next room was the one Matt called the parlor. It was decorated in the same deep green and pink-peach tones, but here the effect was welcoming, homey. The green was the background color of a chintz pattern that covered two armchairs, placed at angles for easy conversation. A small drop-leaf table was set between the chairs, and a reading lamp stood behind one of them. It was a cozy nook where two people could engage in the most intimate kind of discussion. It was where Matt routinely accepted the most sacred confidences from his clients.

The inner sanctum was Matt's own personal office. The desk was clear and the green leather office chair was shiny and new-looking, but it was a working environment. Piles of transcripts sat on side tables, open law books rested on chairs, and the art on the walls reflected Matt's personal taste.

Matt led me to the office, bypassing the parlor area. “I don't know about you,” I began, trailing him through the rooms, “but I could use a drink.”

“Got just the thing, babe,” he called over his shoulder. Opening the door of a mini-fridge, he took out a chilled bottle of pepper vodka, poured a generous slug into a heavy old-fashioned glass, and handed it to me. The combination of fire and ice was like drinking a melted diamond.

Matt heaved a sigh and flung himself into his leather chair. He looked tired and old, jaws sagging, eyelids drooping. I glanced at a framed courtroom sketch of him as a fire-eating young trial honcho and the contrast stabbed my heart.

I decided getting down to business was the only thing that could cheer Matt. “Okay,” I began, “we play the tapes. Since you never gave Jack money for the grand jury minutes, there won't be anything that can really hurt us. Then we investigate this plea of Jack's across the river.”

I stopped and locked eyes with my client. “What I'd like right this minute,” I began, keeping my tone conversational, “is one more assurance that whatever Jack did to get himself indicted in Brooklyn is not going to affect this case.”

He returned my stare with a steady gaze. “Nothing to do with me,” he said. He lifted his glass to his lips and tossed back the vodka with a practiced movement. “But I'd give a lot to know what the hell Di Blasi's up to over there. It's obvious why Lazarus wants to let the Eastern District handle the sentence; they want deniability. They want to be able to say they're not going easy on Jack. But why is Di Blasi going along? He hates Lazarus—everyone knows that—and word is he was pissed as hell when Singer left the office to take a job with Lazarus. She was his protégée, and her walking out was a hell of a blow to his ego.”

“So why is he making it easy for them by taking Fat Jack off their hands?” I mused aloud, finishing his thought. “I'll see what I can find out,” I promised. “Then I'll use my Brooklyn contacts to find out all I can about Detective Edmund Fitzgerald. We should be able to do a lot of damage on cross.”

My client had begun shaking his head somewhere in the middle of my recital. “No, babe,” he said in a more-in-sorrow-than-anger tone of voice. “No, that's not how this game is played. I don't play not to lose. I play to win.”

“And that means—what?” I didn't bother to conceal the annoyance I was feeling. I had every intention of winning, and if Matt didn't realize that, then he might as well fire me right now.

“Did you ever hear of Cato the Elder?” Matt asked. I shook my head; the name was vaguely familiar, but I could see Matt had a story he wanted to tell.

“He was a senator in ancient Rome,” Matt explained. He leaned forward in his chair; the sag had left his jowls and his eyes had regained their spark. “Rome was at war with a city called Carthage, and every time Cato the Elder stood up to speak in the Senate, he said the same thing: ‘
Cartaga delenda est
.' Carthage must be destroyed.”

“Which means?”

“Which means I want more out of this case than a ‘not guilty' verdict,” my client pronounced. “As far as I'm concerned, Lazarus
delenda est
.”

Lazarus must be destroyed. I looked at Matt's face, and saw there what the ancient Romans must have seen on the face of Cato himself: implacable determination. My client wasn't kidding. Lazarus must be destroyed—and he wanted me to do it.

C
HAPTER
F
OUR

The next issue of the
Village Voice
, which appeared a week after Matt's arraignment, featured Detective Edmund Fitzgerald, whom columnist Jesse Winthrop named the Hero Cop, on its cover page. For once, Winthrop's sarcastic knife wasn't out; he called Eddie “the last cop in this cesspool of a city with honor and integrity.”

Eddie's face, his Irish-cop, grownup-altarboy face, stared up at me in gritty black-and-white. It was a face, I reflected glumly, that any jury would love: boyish and open, with a winning smile.

I looked from the newspaper to my client, comparing Eddie's youthful face to Matt Riordan's—the face that had launched a thousand acquittals. It was a handsome face, but it was also one that had known guile, a face that concealed hidden agendas. A face it would be easy to distrust.

We were in my office, on my turf. I'd insisted on that; it would be all too easy to let Matt run the show if we continued to discuss the case on Park Avenue. So he'd come to Brooklyn, still impeccably dressed, in a golf shirt and creased pants. I wore an old T-shirt with the slogan “A Woman Without a Man Is Like a Fish Without a Bicycle.” In the months since Matt and I had broken up, that T-shirt had left my closet a lot more often.

“We've got to do something about this Eddie,” I said. I wasn't crazy about the wistful note in my voice; I'd said the words as if the prospect of “doing something about Eddie” was a dream that might never come true. Not exactly the attitude of a winner.

The door opened and Angelina Irrizary, my investigator, bustled in. She tossed her oversized bag on the couch, and sat next to Matt with an eager expression on her small, heart-shaped face. “What's the story?” she asked, an anticipatory gleam in her eyes. “What's this case all about?”

I let Matt tell it. “I was stupid,” he began. “I see now I was unequivocally stupid. I never should have let Jack talk me into meeting Eddie Fitz in the first place.”

Angie nodded; with Eddie's face on the front page of the
Voice
, she had no reason to ask who Riordan was talking about.

“The first I knew about any of this,” Matt went on, “Jack called me and said he wanted me to meet a friend of his, someone who might have heard something about Nunzie. I said I didn't want to hear any more. I blew him off.”

He paused. I raised an eyebrow; if that had been the whole story, we wouldn't be here now preparing his defense to federal bribery charges.

“Jack called again. Again, I said no to a meeting. But then the rumors about Nunzie's disappearance began floating around the courthouse. People were saying Lazarus was trying to put together a case against me for murder. It was crazy talk, but this time when Jack called, I agreed to meet this guy Eddie.”

“You knew he was a cop?”

“Hell, I counted on his being a cop,” Matt said with the kind of disarming honesty that just might win points with a jury. “And, yes, we talked about the rumors around the courthouse. We talked about Nunzie. But I never told him I'd pay for grand jury minutes, and I never saw grand jury minutes.”

“Wait a minute,” I said, holding up a hand to stop the question hovering on Angie's lips. “Something just occurred to me.” I turned to Matt. “What made you think Eddie Fitz could help you with information about Nunzie? Eddie was a Brooklyn cop,” I explained, as much to myself as to my audience, “and Nunzie was part of a federal RICO case. Eddie had no reason to know about the inner workings of Lazarus' office, unless—”

I broke off and looked at my client expectantly. He sighed, and finished my sentence. “Unless I had reason to believe Eddie Fitz had a connection to Nunzie above and beyond just being a cop,” he said.

“You said Nunzie was into drugs,” I reminded him. “And Eddie Fitz was a member of an elite narcotics task force in Bed-Stuy,” I continued. “Do I take it that Nunzie's drug empire was headquartered in the same neighborhood?” My voice quickened with anticipation; maybe there was something we could do about this Eddie after all.

Matt nodded, then sighed. “I knew a few things about Nunzie I didn't particularly want to know,” he said in a resigned tone. “I had reason to believe his drug empire had more than a few Brooklyn cops on the payroll. When Jack mentioned Eddie Fitz, I remembered hearing Nunzie talk on the phone to someone he called Fast Eddie. I got the impression this Fast Eddie was a kind of partner in Nunzie's drug deals.”

“A partner? Not just a cop who looked the other way, but a partner?” This was too good to be true: Lazarus' star witness was a drug dealer with a badge. Of course, we had yet to actually prove it, but it was definitely worth following up.

“That was how it sounded to me,” Riordan said, then added, “But all I heard was the name Eddie. There could be six cops in that precinct named Eddie for all I know.”

“But only one of them is Lazarus' star witness against you,” I reminded him. “If there's a snowball's chance in hell that dirty cop was Eddie Fitz, we've got to get solid evidence and bring it into court.”

“I'll start digging into the precinct,” Angie promised. She began ticking off her prospective tasks on her polished fingernails. “I'll also check into Eddie Fitzgerald's finances, find out whether he lives like a cop or spends like a drug dealer.”

“I'll get onto the Legal Aid grapevine,” I said. “If there are rumors floating around Brooklyn about Eddie Fitz, I'll know someone who's heard them all.” I gave my client a reassuring smile. “You do the organized crime,” I said. “Leave the disorganized crime to me.”

“Eddie Fitz on cross. God, this is a Brooklyn lawyer's wet dream,” Deke Fischer said two days later. We sat at a little round table under an umbrella at a sidewalk cafe on Montague Street, sipping wine. Ten years earlier, we'd have held down the bar at Capulet's-on-Montague, a beery establishment we used to hit every Friday night, after a grueling week in court. Now it was white wine and mineral water and a table out of the sun. And instead of swapping tales of our adventures in court, we'd spent the first ten minutes comparing notes on health, our own and that of our acquaintances. Ah, middle age.

“I don't remember this Eddie,” I complained.

“You left Legal Aid,” Deke reminded me. “You've expanded your horizons. Oh, sure, you still take criminal cases, but you don't live in the narcotics parts the way we lifers do. If you did, you'd know Eddie Fitz, all right.”

“Why? Why would I know Eddie Fitz?” I sipped the spritzer and made a face. I wanted real booze, but I also wanted to keep my head while talking to Deke.