The Intruder (21 page)

A long, lawyerly pause. They both know the proper etiquette here. Don’t tell your lawyer anything until he asks.

“So,” says Andy. “You don’t feel comfortable talking to the DA about this yourself?”

“Well, you know, Norman and I don’t have the best history.”

Andy nods. The old story. A couple of years back, when Norman McCarthy, the current Manhattan district attorney, was the ambitious executive assistant, he’d had a mob stool called Vinnie the Razor making a case for him against one of Jake’s clients, Ralph Ingelleria. It turned out Vinnie was addicted to tranquilizers. So true-blue, straight-arrow Norman McCarthy had his wife, an earnest young registered nurse, bring Valium and Percodan right into Vinnie’s jail cell. Naturally, Jake put Norman’s wife on the stand and forced her to testify about Vinnie’s precarious mental state, and Norman, naturally, never forgave Jake.

“All right, so there’s a lot of water under the bridge and there’s a lot of water over the bridge,” says Andy.

“There isn’t any bridge at all.” Jake wraps his knuckles around the claw at the end of the left armrest. “That’s why I need you to make these inquiries for me.”

“Well, can you narrow down what I’m asking about?”

“I believe there might have been a murder in the tunnel under the park two nights ago. In fact, there may have been two murders. I’d imagine the police are looking to talk to someone who knows something about them.”

“And you might be that someone?” Andy’s eyebrows rise and his chair tips back at an even more precipitous angle.

“Yes.”

“And does anyone else know what happened?”

“Yeah, the guy who did the actual killing. He came by my office yesterday to pressure me.”

“I see,” says Andy, getting out a pad to take notes. “And is he likely to make a statement to the police on his own?”

“I wouldn’t think so.”

The phone rings again.

“Yes? CNN?” Andy cradles the receiver against the side of his neck as he puts down the notepad and takes an electronic appointment book out of his inside jacket pocket. He punches a few numbers. “Well if three o’clock doesn’t work for them, tell them we can do the interview at four-thirty.”

The phone goes back on the hook and the appointment book goes back in his pocket. Jake feels an uneasy fluttering in his gut.

“Look, Andy, if you don’t have time for this, I completely understand ...”

Andy brings the chair forward so suddenly that he almost bangs his elbows on the desk top. “Oh come on, Jake. You’re like family. I wouldn’t let this fall between the cracks.”

Jake studies his old friend again and tries to remember what specific cases they worked on at Legal Aid together. None come to mind, but somehow he feels comforted in Andy’s presence. It’s not just media hype, he tells himself. Andy cares about him.

“So you’re sure you don’t mind checking this out for me? Do you want a retainer?”

“Oh please, Jake.” Andy waves his right hand through the air like a dismissive butterfly. “Your money’s no good here. Now tell me some more about what happened.”

31

Hey asshole!”

Walt Matuszyk, a muscular guy with black hair extensions, looks up. Philip Cardi is getting out of a blue Honda Accord. His cousin Ronnie remains in the car with a guy called Faffy and a pale blonde girl in the backseat.

Philip climbs up onto the loading dock where Walt’s been working, behind a supermarket in lower Manhattan.

“Nice-looking girl,” Philip says, looking back at the car. “Be a shame to put her head under a truck’s tire.”

The girl looks sullen and bored in the back, like she’s stuck in calculus class.

“Look, look, Phil, I’m sorry,” says Walt. “Tell Carmine, I know I fucked up. I’ll have him the rest of the money a week from Saturday.”

“He’s gettin’ tired of hearing that.” Philip squints up at the sun. “There someplace we can talk around here?”

“Why do we have to go anywhere?”

Philip nods and Ronnie gets out of the car to join them.

“Oh now,” says Walt, the hair extensions hanging halfway down his back with colored beads on the ends. “We don’t have to do it like this, do we Phil?”

“We do it like this, or we take her for a ride.”

Walt looks over at his girl and gets nothing back.

“All right, let’s go downstairs.”

“Spoken like a true gentleman,” says Philip.

They descend to the boiler room and Ronnie shuts the door.

“You’re a fuckin’ moron, Walt.” Philip turns on him. “Carmine’s given you every break. He used to like you, you know.”

“I know, it’s just, like, what can I say, Phil? I got rotten timing. Check that. I got no timing. A guy says he’s gonna come through for me with half a kilo, he shows up with twelve pounds of marijuana. Kiddie dope. You know, who smokes marijuana? Bunch of fuckin’ Deadheads and college students. They practically give away joints at the registrar’s office. What do they need me for? So now I’m stuck. Give me another week, I’ll unload the whole thing.”

Philip kicks him hard between the legs and Walt crumples to the floor.

“So what’s gonna happen in a week? You gonna go to five more topless places where you gonna go around stuffing twenties into girls? You think my uncle wasn’t going to find out about that? Jesus Christ, you motherfucker. I oughta do that girl outside a favor right now and blow your fuckin’ head off. Save her the heartache you’re gonna cause her later.”

Tears well up in Walt’s eyes. “Please, Phil. I swear, things are gonna be different.”

Philip sighs and Ronnie pulls hard on Walt’s hair extensions, yanking him to his feet and then pinning his arms behind him.

“You know I hate it when things have to come to this,” says Philip. “But experience has taught me that it’s very hard for people to change. They need real incentive. Negative reinforcement, they call it. You ever hear of that, Walt?”

“Yes. No. I’m not sure.”

“It means I think I’m gonna have to really hurt you to make sure my message gets across.”

“Phil, no. Listen. You really don’t have to—have a heart.”

“Have a heart? Have a heart? You’re asking me to have a heart? Fuck you! I was in the Green Berets in Vietnam, you motherfucker. I bayonetted old ladies and stuck grenades up people’s asses. You think it bothers me that you’re gonna cry?” He looks
befuddled for a second and then reaches for his fly. “You wanna suck my dick? Is that what you’d like?”

Walt shakes his head vigorously.

“What? You don’t wanna suck my dick? What? Is your mouth too good for me or something?”

Walt tries turning his head to beg Ronnie for mercy, but Ronnie just ignores him and bends back Walt’s elbows, as if he’s about to break both of them.

Philip takes his hand off his fly. “All right, now look, I want us all to be practical about this. I was thinking when I came over here. There’s no point in breaking your legs, ‘cause then that’s just another excuse for you not to go to work. Then I considered crushing your balls, but that would make you even less of a man than you already are and I don’t want to be party to that. Then I remembered how we once slit open a guy’s eyelids during an interrogation in Vietnam, but that could mean optical surgery and I don’t know what kind of insurance you have.”

Walt is trembling so badly that foam is gathering at the right side of his mouth like the head of a beer.

“Are you listening to me, you motherfucker?” says Philip. “I’m trying to be nice to you.”

“I hear you, I hear you.”

“Good,” says Philip, taking a switchblade out of his back pocket and nodding to Ronnie. “So I decided to do you a favor. See, I took this college extension course a few years ago and this science professor I knew, he had a very interesting theory about secondary sexual characteristics.”

Walt tries to squirm out of Ronnie’s grasp but he gets punched in the back of the head and kicked in the stomach by Philip. Then Ronnie hauls him back up to his feet, wraps duct tape across his mouth, and holds a knife to his throat. Philip uses his own switchblade to slit open the front buttons of Walt’s shirt.

“Anyway,” he says. “This professor, Professor DeLaszlo was his name, he started talking about the mammaries. You know.”

He puts his free hand on Walt’s hairy chest.

“Now everybody knows the purpose of a woman’s breasts,” he says. “Right? They produce milk and nourishment for small
children. But why do men have nipples? Have you ever asked yourself that?”

Philip squeezes the left side of Walt’s chest and Walt makes a muffled sound under the heavy silver tape.

“Well, the professor’s theory was that it has to do with evolution,” Philip goes on. “See, back in the old days primitive man was a hunter-gatherer. Just like all these other animals and primates running around. Except a lot of them were bigger and stronger than him. So this professor’s theory was that man’s nipples gave the illusion that he had enormous eyes in his chest. Especially if you were looking at him through the fucking jungle. Those nipples could intimidate you. But now that we’ve progressed out of the jungle, we don’t need them anymore. Am I right?”

He grabs a fistful of flesh from the right side of Walt’s chest and gets a buried yelp out of him.

“So you see, I’m actually being very nice to you,” he says, bringing the blade in close. “I’m only taking something you don’t need anymore. It’s all part of evolution. Right? We don’t have to live like animals.”

32

For the past week, John G. has been out of the tunnels and back on the street. Eating from garbage cans and sleeping on grates again. But somehow the feeling’s different this time. He keeps hearing the words “Friday three o’clock” in his mind. That’s when the doctor will give him the results of his AIDS test.

He stares up at the clock on the Apple Bank building and sees it’s quarter to two in the afternoon. An hour and fifteen minutes until his cause of death will be confirmed.

It’s hard teaching himself to keep track of time again. For months, everything’s just been a blur—day, then night, then day—and sometimes when he’s been on a crack binge, just night, night, night. But now every moment matters again.

He hasn’t been getting high lately. It’s not a conscious effort at changing. He just hasn’t felt like it since Abraham died and he took the test. It’s time to say good-bye to the world and for once it seems appropriate to get his thoughts in order.

After he’d taken the AIDS test, he went back to the tunnel. The police had taken away Abraham’s body and started breaking up some of the cardboard boxes and huts where their friends lived. John G. hid in an archway until they were gone. What was he supposed to say to them? He’d seen everything that happened that night, but he still couldn’t put it together in his head. Mr. Schiff trying to get between Abraham and the stocky guy. Even
with Haldol clearing his mind like fire clearing a forest, it still didn’t make any sense to him.

John had waited until the police took the body away before he made a memorial to Abraham on the trailer’s front steps, using dandelions from the park and the old Hanukkah candles from inside. He meant to say a novena for his friend, but couldn’t think of the words. “Our Father . . .”—that was it.

He watches 1:46 turn into 1:47 on the Apple Bank clock. Then it says the temperature is seventy-six degrees. The sun feels good on the back of his neck. It makes the hair on his arms stand up and turn around. Across the street, in Needle Park, an old woman in a brown dress is sitting on a bench, throwing bread crumbs at pigeons. John imagines her sitting on this same bench, sixty years ago, with smooth legs and saddle shoes, putting on lipstick and waiting for some smart young man to come up out of the subway and walk her home, arm in arm. Another lifetime.

Now she sits on the bench alone and John G. waits to hear when he will die.

He arrives at the medical clinic fifteen minutes late, thinking he’ll be made to wait anyway. But Dr. Wadhwa is already standing by the reception desk, looking impatient.

“I thought you weren’t going to make it,” he says.

“Man’s got a right to be late to his own funeral, hasn’t he?”

The doctor, a little man with thick wavy hair and a dark cherub’s face, furrows his brow and leads him through a waiting room packed with angry pregnant women, sad stoned men, and joyous children unaware of what awaits them here. They remind John G. of exhausted passengers on a late afternoon train. Watch the closing doors. Why isn’t he being made to wait with them? Poor bastards. One of them, a guy with a smear of greasy black-gray hair, has what looks like a massive purple hickey on the back of his neck. On closer inspection, it turns out to be a huge lesion. In fact, his face and neck are covered with lesions. Like he’s being kissed to death. So why am I getting in before him? John G. wonders.

Wadhwa takes him into a bright narrow office with a desk and
an examining table. Pictures of babies and reproductive systems on the walls and a little bit of blood on the floor. Birth, death.

“Pardon the mess,” says the doctor. “We share space with an OB-GYN clinic.”

“I’m not fussy.”

The doctor sits down behind the desk, folds his hands, and smiles.

“You’re fine,” he says.

“What?”

“I said you’re all right. At least for the moment.”

The sun coming through the windows. A baby cries in the next room.

“What’re you talking about?” says John G. “Is this some kind of fuckin’joke?”

“No, it’s not a joke. Your tests came back negative.” The doctor lowers his deep brown eyes to the file on his desk. “Your T cell count is normal. Your CD 4 is well above two hundred. There are no guarantees, of course, and you will want to get retested in a few months. But for now everything appears to be fine. I wanted to tell you personally. I thought you’d be pleased.”

The shelter. The tunnel. The hospital. We have a few more questions before you go, Mr. Gates. You’re being held at the station. Wait for the signal.

“I don’t understand.”

“Whoever told you they’d given you AIDS might not have had it themselves or perhaps didn’t transmit it to you.”