The Intruder (32 page)

“I could say I tried to stop Philip from killing the guy.”

Susan shakes her head gravely. “I don’t think so, pal. I haven’t made up my mind whether to have you testify or not.”

“It’s my call, Susan.” He starts tracing a tic-tac-toe board on a fogged-up part of the window.

“And I’m your lawyer.” She leans over her desk with poochy eyes and a wised-up mouth. “It’s your neck, but I’m trying the case. Right?”

“Right.” Jake draws an X in the center square and begins filling in the rest of the board.

“So that brings me to our second point: having a story of our own to sell the jury. It would be much more convincing if there was somebody else to corroborate the fact that you tried to break up the fight, don’t you think?” She peers over, not quite getting his full attention.

Jake draws a diagonal line through his three X’s and then wipes away the board. He’s left staring out the window again, as if he’s looking at a picture of life without complications.

“So can you think of anybody like that?”

“Like what?”

“Somebody in the tunnel who could back up your version of the story.”

He starts to draw another tic-tac-toe board and then thinks better of it. “Not unless Johnny Gates wants to say a few words for me.”

“Who’s that? The homeless guy who was bothering you in the first place?”

Jake half smiles and hangs his head. “Yeah. I don’t think he’s looking to do me any favors. He’s dead.”

“What makes you say that?” Susan pulls a file out of one of the boxes. “The police only found one body in the tunnel.”

Jake blows on the windowpane and draws a zero. It isn’t that he hasn’t considered the possibility. But after replaying the scene in his mind, he’d concluded that either the police hadn’t located the body or that Gates had gone somewhere else to die. There were no reports of him turning up anywhere else.

“All right. So maybe he’s alive. So what?”

“Do you think he saw what happened?”

“I guess.” Jake coughs, wondering why Susan’s looking at him so intently. “But he’s crazy. He’s a crackhead.”

“So’s their witness. The one who isn’t an accomplice, at any rate. They’d cancel each other out.”

Jake comes back to his chair and sits down. He notices the crease isn’t as sharp on his suit trousers since he started taking them to the cleaners once a month instead of once every two weeks. But with the bail bond hanging over him, plus Susan’s fee, the mortgage, and Alex’s school bills, he’s learning to economize.

“I don’t even know where to start looking for Gates,” he says. “He’s probably in jail or a state mental hospital, if any of them are still open. Or back out on the street. For crying out loud, he harassed my wife and attacked my son. Now he’s supposed to save my neck?”

“When you have lemons, make lemonade,” Susan says. “Ancient defense lawyer’s maxim.”

Jake finds himself actually visualizing lemons and he bites his lips in distaste. “But I don’t even know where to begin looking for this guy.”

“Can I make a suggestion?” Susan puts her feet up and tips back in her seat.

“What?”

“You have less than a month. Try.”

61

Don’t look at the cue ball, John G. tells himself. Whatever you do, don’t look at the cue ball.

He’s in the rec room of the Brooklyn Redevelopment and Reclamation Society, being interviewed for admission by Ted Shakur. Behind them, two other homeless men are playing pool on a green felt-top table. The room is clean almost to the point of characterlessness. There are no slogans on the walls, no bars on the windows, and the new color TV in the corner is turned off. Nevertheless, John is still having a hard time screening things out.

He keeps looking at the smooth white cue ball instead of concentrating on Ted’s questions.

“Are you now drug free?” asks Ted, pinching his white left nostril and his black right nostril. Ted Palomino Nose.

“Uh, yeah. Basically. I haven’t done anything except the medication.”

“What kind of medication?”

The cue ball knocks a solid red ball into the upper left-corner pocket. It’s funny the way that little white ball moves the others around, scattering them across the table, sending them spinning into their rightful holes.

“I said, ‘What kind of med-i-ca-tion?’ “ Ted asks in a loud voice.

John G. realizes he must have missed the previous question
because he was distracted. He tries to bear down and control the shit storm in his mind.

“Just the Haldol the doctors prescribed,” he says, showing Ted the orange bottle and trying to sound sure of himself.

Ted strokes his salt-and-pepper beard and gives John a searching look. “You know we’re not supposed to be taking that many people with psychological problems. We only have room for a couple like that.”

“I know, I know. But I’m getting better.”

Ted still looks suspicious. “You ever try and kill yourself?” His eyes scan John’s arms and wrists.

John G. takes a quick mental inventory. Has he ever really tried to kill himself? He wants to be honest. Truthfulness is the one thing he’s held on to on the street.

“No, I’ve thought about it,” he says, remembering that bleak morning on the subway platform and the times he’s looked into a pair of oncoming headlights, “but I haven’t actually gotten around to trying it.”

He’s starting to mind-trip again, despite all his best efforts. The white ball slams into the eight ball.

Sunlight fading. Shar waving from across the street.

I love you, Daddy.

She died in his arms.

John G. grips the table, trying to hold on to the present. The past is the past.

Ted is still talking to him. “So what I’m saying is if you get accepted in this program, you’re gonna get your urine tested regularly. You got a problem with that?”

The white ball slams a purple striper into the side pocket and then rolls back just a little, to avoid following it down.

“No, that’s all right,” John G. says, struggling to focus and meet Ted’s eye.

“ ‘Cause a lot of guys don’t like another man handling their piss. They get kinda sen-si-tive about that.”

For a second, John is lost in a daydream. He sees himself perched on a ledge with Ted’s scarred hand reaching out to him from above. He’s afraid to take it. Afraid to move. Afraid he’ll fall.

Oh my daughter, forgive me, for I have sinned.

Would she forgive him? Her smiling toothless face floats in front of him, framed by yellow hair.

One side of his mind says he should cry out to her, ask her to absolve him again. But the other side tells him it’s just an illusion, the light fixture hanging at a certain angle. The past is the past.

“No, I don’t mind the piss tests,” he says finally. “What’s gone is gone. It’s not like it’s in you anymore, is it?”

SLAM! The yellow-striped ball rolls into the lower right-hand corner. The cue ball backs away.

“Okay,” says Ted, adjusting the kente-cloth hat on his head and making a note to himself. “Now if you get accepted into this program, you’re gonna be turning your life over to us. For the next few months, you’re gonna sleep in this shelter, eat with other men in this shelter, and go to work with them in the morning. We get you a job with a construction crew helping build apartments for other homeless people. You get a hundred and seventy dollars a week, and sixty-five of that goes back to us to cover your rent.”

Blam! The solid blue hits both sides of the lower left-corner pocket and then bounces away. The cue ball keeps rolling, though, stopping maybe an eighth of an inch before it falls in.

“You ever swing a hammer before?”

“I used to drive a train. I was a motorman.”

Ted writes that down, duly impressed. Slam! Green solid in the side pocket.

“You’ll learn,” says Ted. “That’s what we’re about. Teaching you a trade. Giving you a struc-ture you can fall back on. Can you handle that?”

“I need it,” John tells him. “I need it the way other people need water.”

The cue ball goes flying into the lower right-hand pocket. It disappears with a gulp and starts rolling along the lower deck of the table.

John straightens up. “When do I start?”

“Well, you haven’t been accepted yet.” Ted makes another notation. “Though to be honest, we have a couple of slots open
right now and you may qualify. I have to talk to the administration.”

“I’m ready,” says John.

But in truth, he’s not sure he is. He just knows it’s time to move off the ledge he’s been on. If he stays at the Interfaith Volunteers Center he’ll start having fights with Ms. Greenglass and begin using drugs again.

“I hope it works out. We’ll be glad to have you.” Ted Shakur stands up and offers him his hand. A big dry bear paw with scabs across the knuckles and calluses on the fingers.

John takes it gratefully and squeezes it.

62

Over the next few days, Jake and the private investigator hired by Susan, Rolando Goodman, divide up the work. Jake concentrates on trying to track down John G. while Rolando looks for information to undermine Philip Cardi’s credibility.

On a brisk Tuesday morning, Jake shows up at the 241st Street Dispatch Office, looking to talk to Gates’s former coworkers.

Mel Green, the supervisor, is standing there in an Everlast weight belt, stacking bootlegged videotapes of films made by various members of the Sheen family. Ernest Bayard, John G.’s old conductor, sits on a chair in the corner, staring at the trains going past the windows.

“I have to say John G. was more a family-type guy the last few years,” says Mel, once Jake’s introduced himself. “The rest of us didn’t spend that much time with him.”

“So you wouldn’t know where I could start looking for him?”

“No, man. Like I say, he was mostly with his wife and little girl. And once he lost them, he just fell apart on us. I don’t know where he went.” Mel puts his hands on his hips and looks at Ernest in the corner. “Hey, didn’t he stay with you a while?”

Ernest just sits there, with his bald head pitched into his hands, looking shell-shocked.

“What’s the matter with him?” Jake asks.

“Ah, he just got promoted from conductor to motorman.” Mel piles
The Mighty Ducks
and
Hot Shots
on top of
Apocalypse Now.
“He took over John G.’s old line.”

“He doesn’t seem too happy about it, does he?”

“Well.” Mel rubs his hands together. “He’s had two people jump in front of his train in the last month.”

Meanwhile, Rolando Goodman, a six-foot four-inch, two-hundred-fifty-pound, half-black, half-Dominican ex-pro football player, is out in Bensonhurst. He’s talking to the owner of the Crown Royale Auto Body Shop.

Jake’s used Rolando a few times on old cases. His toughness has never been an issue; his thoroughness and subtlety are seriously questionable, though. He’s a prideful hothead who tends to storm away when he feels people aren’t giving him the respect he deserves. A real liability for an investigator.

“So you don’t know this guy Crazy Phil or his cousin?” he asks.

The owner, a lardy pockmarked slab of a guy named Tony, who has hair that goes straight back like he’s driving a hundred miles an hour, shakes his head. “I just told you. I don’t know any Crazy Phil.”

“Well, do you know a guy named Philip Cardi?” asks Rolando.

“I know a lot of guys named Phil. It’s a common name in this neighborhood. Kinda like Leroy in your neighborhood.”

“Leroy?” Rolando’s shoulders stiffen. He’s wearing an Armani suit, a Turnbull & Asser shirt, and an Hermès tie with a gold pin on it. He wanted to show these guineas how to dress. “Leroy? What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Means you probably live near a lot of guys named Leroy.”

“Look out that window, will you?” Rolando points to a white car in the parking lot facing Eighty-sixth Street.

“What am I looking at?”

“That’s a Lexus, man. That’s one of the most expensive automobiles on the market. I paid fifty thousand fucking dollars for that car. You think I drive it through a neighborhood full of Leroys?”

“How the hell should I know?”

“Rolando Goodman does not live with Leroy,” he says, drawing himself up like a society matron who’s been given a paper plate.

“And I don’t know any Crazy Phil.” Tony, the owner, staples a couple of pink invoices together.

“Good-bye,” says Rolando.

He stalks out to his Lexus and drives away.

Tony, the owner, watches the exhaust float up into the white winter sky. Then he opens the door to the garage and calls out to a short young guy welding the underside of a black Impala.

“Hey, Carlo. You still got Ronnie’s number? Someone was here looking for his cousin.”

63

I ressure begins to mount. The trial date is now three weeks away. Money is getting tight. Under $40,000 in the bank after all the legal expenses and another big school bill is coming. Jake tries to drum up some business from home, but there are no new cases coming in. No one wants a lawyer whose problems are worse than his own. Thank God for Bob Berger throwing him enough work to keep him busy when he isn’t looking for John Gates.

In the meantime, Dana has joined the search. Through a friend in the hospital records department, she hears that a woman named Greenglass called from the Interfaith Volunteers Center some months back, trying to get John G.’s file. Dana makes an appointment to see her.

“You can’t believe how much I did for that man,” Elaine Greenglass is saying. “Every morning for three months, I stood in front of subway entrances and supermarkets, handing out leaflets for him. Every weeknight and every other afternoon, I worked the phones.”

“You were a dedicated campaign worker,” Dana says, trying to sound sympathetic.

She’s been sitting in Ms. Greenglass’s office for a half hour, trying to figure out how to work the conversation around to John G. and his current whereabouts.

“I got that man elected mayor.” Ms. Greenglass pulls out a hair and inspects it under her desk lamp. “But when he got to City Hall—nothing. Not one phone call. No job waiting for me at Department of Personnel. No position at HRA. Nothing available at Landmarks Commission or HPD. Just forgotten. All that work. Slaving!”