Mean Streak (8 page)

“He's a mainstay of the Brooklyn war on drugs,” my old friend replied. He ran a hand through a thinning thatch of kinky black hair. “He testifies in a lot of cases, and a lot of us think he perjures himself on a regular basis to get convictions. Some of us even go so far as to wonder which side of the drug war he's on.”

“You mean you think Eddie's a bent cop,” I confirmed. Deke nodded. “But can you prove it?”

“Hell, Cass, if I could prove it, I'd have won my last three trials. He put away three guys on drug deals I'd be willing to swear he took a cut from.”

“You're saying he's a drug dealer?” Disbelief edged my voice; this was too good to be true. And Deke himself admitted it was sheer speculation, nothing I could take to a jury. Yet.

“Everybody in Brooklyn knows he is,” Deke replied. This was hyperbole; what he meant was, everybody at Legal Aid was convinced they were losing cases because Eddie was a liar. “His partners are no prizes, either,” he went on.

I fished a notebook out of my tote bag and took down names: Dwight Straub and Stan Krieger. Then I went back to the task at hand.

“You know as well as I do,” I reminded Deke, “that what ‘everybody in Brooklyn knows' is not admissible in evidence. What I need are solid facts. What I need are witnesses who'll come to court and tell the jury what Eddie Fitz is really all about. Can you help me with that?”

Deke laughed. It was a derisive laugh that held a tinge of self-disgust. “Sure, Cassie, for you, anything. The only problem is that all the witnesses I can get you are doing time. If you don't mind a little thing like that, I can give you six, seven names of people who'll roll over on Eddie Fitz.”

“Are they all junkies?” I asked, my tone reflecting my disappointment. Deke was right; his former clients were unlikely to convince a jury to discount the testimony of the Hero Cop.

He nodded. “Junkies are usually the people who tend to buy drugs,” he said. “Of course, they might have kicked in prison,” he went on. His face brightened. “They might have found Jesus or Allah and turned over a new leaf.”

“That'll help a lot,” I mumbled. The trouble with Deke was that he was quite possibly serious in his assertion that getting religion in jail would turn a junkie felon into a credible witness against a member of New York's Finest. This level of denial was one reason I felt I could no longer practice law for the Legal Aid Society.

“There's a guy called TJ,” Deke said. “A black dude, lives in Eddie's precinct. Word on the street is that they're very tight, that TJ is Eddie's front man.” He lifted his wineglass to his lips, then put it back down on the scarred table. “If you could get TJ on the stand, you might have a chance of convincing a jury that Eddie's more crook than cop.”

“Why?” I countered. “Why should the word of a drug dealer carry more weight than that of a user?”

Deke's answering smile took ten years off his age. He sat back in his chair with the annoying self-satisfied look that had always pushed my buttons, and replied, “Because this particular drug dealer happens to be a registered narcotics informant.”

“And I suppose Eddie was the cop who registered him?” I demanded. “God, what balls!” I went on, lost in admiration. “A cop who goes into business with a drug dealer covers his partner by registering him as an informant. That way if a cop who's not on the take busts the dealer, the bad cop can just step in and say, ‘let him go, he's my snitch.' Perfect.”

“Not exactly,” Deke replied. “Eddie's partner, Stan Krieger, actually did the registering. But it comes to the same thing: TJ has credibility, and it was given to him by the cops themselves.”

I thought about it. “So if I put TJ on the stand as a registered informant,” I said, “the only way Singer can tear him down is to show he's a dealer—and if she does that, she admits that Eddie's own partner, this Krieger, is a bent cop.”

“A nice double bind,” Deke approved.

“So where can I find TJ?” I asked.

“I had a client who might be able to help,” Deke replied. “I'll bring him down from upstate on a writ, and you can talk to him.”

I paid for the drinks and walked home down Clinton Street—named for DeWitt, not Bill—with visions of destroying Eddie Fitz on the witness stand dancing in my head.

I'd met Jesse Winthrop once before; he'd looked just like the picture that headed his column: a fanatic's eyes, a mane of hair down to his shoulders, a handsome-craggy face. A New York face, full of dashed hopes and wry humor.

He looked old. Not just older, but old. The hair was still a good deal longer than most men wore in the nineties, but it was all white now, and hung limp and lank. The face was craggier than ever, but the fire in his eyes had banked. He looked tired; it was hard to put this old man together with the exposés that had electrified the city.

“Mr. Winthrop,” I began, taking the chair nearest his and tossing my bag onto the floor. I wasn't sure exactly why I'd felt compelled to call him, to make an appointment to meet him and talk about Eddie Fitz. I just knew I somehow owed it to this man to let him know his Hero Cop might take a big fall from the pedestal he'd placed him on. After two weeks of digging, I was beginning to see that Eddie Fitz had feet of very muddy clay indeed.

“Jesse,” he amended. “And you are, as I recall, Cass instead of Cassie.”

I nodded. “Good memory.”

“Part of the job.” He shifted his gaze to the window. We were seated at a window table at The Peacock, one of the Village's best coffeehouses. The tables were tiny wooden affairs that just barely managed to support coffee cups; the chairs were eclectic leftovers from Grandmother's attic, the atmosphere was dark and quiet, and they played good classical music. And the window seats looked directly out onto Greenwich Avenue, so you could sit for hours people-watching and sipping cappuccino.

It was a good place for a rendezvous, a place where you could tell secrets and the people at the next table wouldn't even give you a glance; they were busy arguing about the Czech movie they'd just seen at the Quad or doing their homework for NYU, scribbling on notepaper with a huge book open on the spindly table. Or they were in love; two twentysomething girls dressed in black held hands and gazed into one another's eyes at a table near the huge brass and copper coffee urn the owners had brought from the Old Country.

I'd once broken up with a boyfriend in here, and nobody noticed or cared that I stormed out in a flood of noisy tears.

“If a beached whale washes up on Coney Island,” Jesse pronounced in his gravelly New York voice, “it's news. If a shark does the same thing, it's not. Nobody cares what happens to the shark, and nobody cares what happens to Matt Riordan.”

“This is not the Jesse Winthrop I used to read,” I said, letting my tone carry all the very real disappointment I was feeling. I'd hoped he'd be at the least a neutral observer of the trial, rather than a shill for Lazarus. “In the old days,” I went on, “you would have lambasted Lazarus for bending the rules to nail Riordan. You would have reminded your readers that even a guy like Riordan deserves the Constitution, that the authorities can't convict him just because of his reputation. Hell,” I said with a rueful smile, warming to my theme, “I can just see the article now. You'd have called it something like ‘Even Sharks Can Be Endangered,' or—”

“How about ‘Sympathy for the Devil'?” Winthrop cut in.

“I like it.”

“Well, you're not going to see it in print anytime soon. I can't say I approve of everything Nick Lazarus has done on this case, but one thing I do know is that Eddie Fitz is a straight-arrow cop who did the right thing.” The salt-and-pepper beard was now all salt, and the magnificent head of hair was a halo of white. Winthrop looked like an Old Testament prophet, but his prophecies had grown increasingly irrelevant as the sixties receded from the popular mind.

“You're very sure about that,” I remarked. I opened my mouth to ask whether he had ever heard his Hero Cop mention a guy named TJ, but Jesse beat me to the conversational punch.

“I'd better be sure,” he said. “I've got a book deal pending.”

Why did this surprise me? Why did I rock back in the little wire chair and look at the man with new eyes?

Because on some level I'd still believed in Jesse Winthrop, the incorruptible journalist, the one lone guy who would never sell out, no matter what.

He caught the look; how could he not?

“Don't give me any self-righteous bullshit, Cass. I get enough of that from the little shits at the
Voice
, the ones who still think they can change the world with one more exposé on rotten landlords. I've been writing articles and columns for forty years now, and what have I got to show for it? I still live in a rent-controlled apartment, I drive a ten-year-old car, I take my vacations in what is euphemistically called a recreational vehicle and is really a sardine can on wheels. I keep going around and around on the carousel, but I never get close to the brass ring. Until now. Until I latched on to Eddie Fitz. I'm going to ride him to the big time, Counselor. My book will be another
Prince of the City;
my agent is already talking movie and I haven't written word one of the book. If Eddie Fitz is anything but a hero, I sure as hell don't want to know about it.”

“Until after you've signed the contract,” I amended.

His nod was firm. “Until after I've signed the contract,” he repeated. His lips formed a smile, but to me it looked more like a rictus, which was appropriate. The Jesse Winthrop whose column I'd read for twenty years was dead.

I paid for the coffee and stepped out into the humid day with a heavy heart.

Deke's client, Shavon Pettigrew, was in shackles, which pleased the court officers no end. They loved it when state prisoners were brought in with leg irons and handcuffs chained to their belts. They marched him through the corridor to the lawyers' conference room and deposited him on a hard chair. They unlocked the shackles only when I asked; they'd have been happy to leave him trussed up like a dressed pig.

“Do I know you?” he asked with studied insolence. He sprawled in the seat, legs wide apart, the way some macho types sit on the subway, thrusting themselves physically into the space of the people sitting next to them. As if their status depended on the amount of cubic feet they could command.

“No, but I know you,” I replied evenly. “Your lawyer said you might want to talk to me.” It had taken me almost two weeks to pull the legal strings to bring him to Brooklyn. He
had
to talk—but I wasn't about to let him know how much I wanted his information.

“My lawyer,” Pettigrew snorted. He corrected me with a contemptuous sneer. “You mean my Legal Aid. What that faggot got to say about me, anyway?”

Deke Fischer was practically born married, but I let the epithet go. In this guy's streetwise mind, any man who didn't wipe out his enemies with an AK 47 was a faggot, and it wasn't going to do me any good to argue the point.

“How you get me down here, anyway?” he continued.

“I had the court issue a writ of
habeas corpus ad testificandum
,” I explained, taking the question literally. It was my way of letting Shavon know I wasn't going to bullshit him or talk down to him.

He picked up on the implication at once. He probably couldn't have read the words I'd said, but he got the point. “If you mean testify, I ain't gonna,” he said. He shook his head from side to side; his hair was so close-cropped as to appear shaved. “Not for you, not for nobody.”

“Good,” I replied. “Testimony from a double murderer I don't need.”

“So I can go now?” he asked, moving his arms in the wide gesture of a rapper. “We finished here?”

“Well, there are a couple of questions I'd like to ask you,” I said.

“Why you think I'm gonna answer, bitch?”

I let it go. Much as I would have enjoyed teaching Shavon Pettigrew some manners, this wasn't what our meeting was about. And in his world, just as all white men were faggots, all women, black or white, were bitches. The best I could do was show him I was a tough bitch.

“Well, for one thing, I did you a favor, bringing you down to the city. Your mother doesn't get up to Dannemora very often, and she can come to see you while you're at Rikers. And so can your girlfriends. So right there, I think you owe me a little something.”

He mulled it over. “I didn't ax you to bring me down here,” he pointed out.

“No, but I did call your mother and the three girls in your life, let them know where to find you. That ought to be worth a couple of answers.”

“Depends on what kind a answers you talkin' about,” he countered. I could see the wheels turning behind the sullen brown eyes. The ethics of the 'hood required repayment of debts, but the repayment would be carefully scaled to the size of the favor done him.

I nodded approval. “Good point. I'm not looking to hurt anybody and I'm not asking you to rat anybody out. But I do need to find a friend of yours.” I leaned forward in the chair and locked eyes with the hard-faced young man across from me. “Now, don't go ballistic on me,” I warned, raising a hand, “but I need to find TJ.”

“Oh, shit,” he cried, waving his arms and nearly leaping out of his chair. “You raggin' on me 'bout TJ, bitch? You expectin' me to give up that brother to a white bitch? Whatchou think I am, some kinda raggedy-ass—?”

“Chill, Shavon,” I said. “Please. Sit down and listen. I already said I have no desire to hurt TJ. I just want to talk to him. I think it's possible he wants to talk to me. His partner, Eddie, is about to testify against a friend of mine, and I need TJ to take the stand and tell the truth about Eddie.”

At the mention of the name Eddie, Shavon quieted down. “That Eddie be one mean motherfucker,” he said. “I know for a fack TJ ain't wanted to have nothin' to do with that cracker. But that Eddie jammed him so bad, he ain't had no choice but to let the little faggot in.”