Billy Povich: Loot The Moon Part 5

The old man took a huge, exaggerated bite. "Mmmmm," he moaned. "Tasty!"

Bo giggled. "I want some cat, too!"

"Puts hair in your belly," the old man said, mouth open, the toast circling inside a cage of tan teeth and blackened metal molars.

"This guy Crespie-his son flew fighter jets for the Air Force," Billy said. "Won some medals."

The old man swallowed with a little gag. He cleared his throat and then said, "Then I guess were lucky it aint the sons funeral, cause wed be stuck in here all day." Some emotion that Billy could not identify had cut the old mans voice ragged. He went on, "What the G.o.dd.a.m.n does it matter what the son did? Any idiot can be a father. Even monkeys hump by instinct."

"Pa," Billy pleaded, weakly.

"Why do you only write about dead people?" Bo asked.

"Because hes good at it," the old man answered.

Billys eyes widened at the compliment. When was the last time he had heard praise from the old man? "Because thats my job," Billy told his son. "I dont do the investigating reporting I used to do. Im an obituary writer. I write a lot of them."

"Did you write Moms?" Bo asked.

Billy felt a wave of internal heat, and an invisible hand around his throat. "Not that one," he said. He couldnt look at the kid.

"Why not?"

After a beat of silence, the old man rescued Billy. "Meow!" he cried. Then he gasped. "OhmiG.o.d! I think I did eat cat hair." The boy laughed.

Billy seized the distraction. "I need to read these doc.u.ments for the case Im working for Martin."

"Whatchu got there?" asked the old man.

Billy counted the sheets of computer printout in his hand. "I got the five-page arrest record of the guy who shot Judge Harmony." He thumbed quickly through the pages. "Martin is right about this guy-Adam Rackers wasnt a regular street thug. He was a professional thief. Mostly B and Es in unoccupied homes. Some shoplifting."

He flipped the page, then another.

"Lots of shoplifting. But other than getting involved in a couple of bar fights-"

"Which can happen to anyone," the old man interrupted, with an evil smile.

"-theres no violence on his record. Not a single weapons charge, either."

Downstairs at the funeral, the gathering prayed aloud. Their m.u.f.fled words bled through the floor in a mumble.

"Just because he was never arrested for shootin somebody doesnt mean he never did it before," the old man said.

"Meow," said Bo. The cat answered him with a little whine. The boy laughed and crunched an open mouthful of cereal at Ziggs.

"Still feels odd that this guy would suddenly shoot a judge," Billy said. "Martin thinks he got paid to do it, and Im beginning to think the same thing."

"Maybe it was personal," the old man said. Billy couldnt be sure if his father was trying to help, or just being argumentative. "Did this guy know the judge?"

"Never had a case in front of him."

"Did he meet him in a bar? Did he sit behind him one day at McCoy Stadium? Did they have words over somebodys eyes on somebody elses wife? Did the judge threaten to have him arrested?"

The cat popped up from the table, stretched, then jumped to the floor. It walked away like a runway model, crossing its feet in front of each other over an invisible line down the middle of the hall.

This was an emergency for Bo. The kid slid off his seat, grabbed Einstein, and ran after the cat, calling urgently over his shoulder, "Ziggs wants to play!"

"Keep an eye on him," Billy ordered.

"Dont let him slip on that b.u.t.tered tail," the old man added. To Billy, he said, "Maybe the judge was blackmailing this guy. Maybe they were in some crime ring together, and so he killed him."

Billy squinted at his father a moment, and tried to remember the path of their argument. How the h.e.l.l had they gotten here? "The judge was rich," Billy said. "He made a fortune on the law books he wrote. If I had his money, Id throw my money away."

"Or gamble it away," the old man cracked.

"And Gil Harmony was too honest ..." Billy flipped papers in the folder. "Look at all these commentaries the judge wrote for the paper. Heres one on juvenile justice. And this, on gang prevention. Heres something on const.i.tutional law ... religion in politics. And he wrote about more than just the law. Judge Harmony rode the train twice a week for the past five years, to teach in Manhattan, and this essay is his plan to improve Amtrak service down the eastern seaboard. The guy was an expert on everything." Billy stared at the paper, at the byline that read Gilbert D. Harmony. He said aloud to himself, "Martin was right, Judge Harmony was Mr. Perfect. He wasnt part of a crime ring." Billy stopped, lightly slapped his own cheek, as if to wake himself. "Why am I even arguing something so ridiculous with you?"

The old man picked at the dangle of chicken skin under his chin. He looked away. "When I croak pretty soon," he asked, "will you write my obituary?"

"Pop-"

"Because that rag you work for dont have anybody else who can write a good one." He looked at Billy. "Youll be honest, wont you?" The old mans stare sent a cold tickle down Billys back, like a drip of ice water. "Because back in my youth, I walked around with lies stuffed in my pockets. Your mother could have told you that ... Probably did." He looked at Billy for confirmation.

Billy did not flinch, did not even blink. He had accepted his father into his home after the old mans stroke, but Billy would not discuss his dead mother with the man who had abandoned her in Billys youth.

The old man sounded guarded. "So when I go, I want to be carried out on the truth. The lies, the affairs, everything-put it all in there. Okay?"

He seemed to get older before Billys eyes. Not exactly like he was aging; more like he was beginning to decompose. Billy wasnt sure if he could speak. "Ill write it," he heard himself say.

Organ music rumbled through the floor again. The song was supposed to be a hymn, but played painfully slow, it sounded like a death march. The old man dipped his head and flashed a canine tooth at Billy, like a little dagger in the devils grin. "Long ago, people used to think that I was Mr. Perfect, too, just like your judge," he said. "They all died disappointed."

eight.

Martin probably should have been listening to the testimony being offered to the court by the mother of the teenager who had died at the hands of Martins client. But there was nothing else Martin could do for his client, who sat beside him, already convicted of motor vehicle homicide.

This was the gut-wrenching part of the sentencing hearing, the victim-impact statements, and Martin allowed himself to be distracted. He thought about June Harmony and her son, Brock. They would be on their way to Martins office by now, so that the three of them could walk together to the opening of Gil Harmonys will. Martin had not seen Brock since the crash-actually, he realized, had not seen him since he was a teen. And though he knew Brock was now in his twenties, he dreaded having to look a fatherless little boy in the eye.

Thoughts of Brock reminded Martin of his client, who, at twenty-seven, was just a few years older. He was an incurious roofer named Stokely, who seemed incapable of a single empathetic thought. Martin looked at him. Stokely was a pudgy son of a b.i.t.c.h, deeply tanned, with a buzzed haircut and a sour expression that made him seem eternally put out. He had worn blue jeans to his own sentencing, which had nearly given Martin a heart attack. Was he trying to get the maximum?

They sat together at the defense table, a varnished maple rectangle as smooth as a mirror. At trial, the table had been cluttered with doc.u.ments, transcripts, and notes. For sentencing, it was bare.

At a podium a few feet away, the mother of the young man Stokely had run down addressed the court. She spoke slowly, in a low voice, about her boy. In the sausage-making process of criminal justice, the court always gave victims or their families the chance to testify about how the crime had wrecked their lives, before the judge p.r.o.nounced the sentence.

" ... and you never once during the trial showed remorse, Mr. Stokely, for what youve taken from my family," she said.

Stokely stared straight ahead, looking bored. Martin looked away.

Shes right, Martin thought. In private conferences, Stokely had seemed contemptuous toward his seventeen-year-old victim, whom he vaguely seemed to blame for ruining Stokelys life by dying under the impact of an SUV doing forty miles per hour on a sidewalk.

" ... you have stolen sixty or seventy years of a young mans life and forever changed the course of our family history ... ."

Martin dropped his hands in his lap and looked at the witness. She was trim, a little older than most moms of a teenager, maybe fifty-five. Her hair was cut in a perfect shoulder-length bob. She had worn no makeup to court and her eyes looked lifeless. Maybe she didnt want to take the chance shed cry and smear mascara over herself, or maybe she just felt lifeless. She stood stiffly at the podium and spoke from notes handwritten on sheets of paper that were ragged down one edge where they had been ripped from a spiral binder. She spoke directly at the side of Stokelys head. He did not look at her.

The mothers grace awed Martin, and fed the disgust he held in his heart for his client. Martin had busted his a.s.s for this guy, uncovering a crack in the chain of evidence with Stokelys blood test the night of the accident. A cop had left the test sample unguarded for three hours in an unlocked cruiser. With a ferocious argument, Martin had the blood test thrown out of evidence. Prosecutors could not prove by science that Stokelys blood had approximately the alcohol concentration of a Polynesian mai tai. Then Martin had negotiated a fair plea bargain with the prosecution. Some reasonable jail time for Stokely to think things over, but not so much that he couldnt salvage the best part of his own life.

The deal was just.

His client had rejected it.

"Dont want justice," Stokely had said. He had wanted Martin to get him off at trial.

" ... my son was an industrious young man who was studying education. Being a teacher, that was Clarkes high hope, not to conquer Wall Street or Mount Everest, just to teach children how to read ... ."

The prosecutor didnt need a blood test to prove Stokely had been drinking all night. Not with the testimonies of bartenders and other patrons, and with Stokelys own credit card receipt for seventy-five dollars in liquor, signed by Stokely in handwriting that looked like a kindergarten doodle.

At trial, the prosecutor had pounded the facts. Martin could only pound the table. The Const.i.tution provides that no matter how cold your heart and how terrible your crime, you deserve a competent and robust defense. If Martin could have won the case on some arcane technicality, he would have gone for the prosecutors throat. He gave Stokely a tenacious fight, and lost.

Sometimes, despite the best efforts of everyone involved, justice prevails.

He thought about Gil Harmony, and of justice. Martin hoped that justice didnt consider that case closed, as the police did.

Stokely sighed in boredom and blatantly checked his wrist.w.a.tch. Martin blanched. What the f.u.c.k are you doing? Was he really that obtuse? Or was this a message to the court and to the grieving mother that he just didnt care?

The mother paused a moment, then raised her voice. "Am I bothering you, Mr. Stokely?" she asked. She drummed her fingernails on the podium. "You know what bothers me? You ran down my son from behind, so you never saw what he looked like. Well, I want you to see him."

She left her notes on the podium and grabbed a shoe box from the front row of the gallery. With her lips sealed with determination, she marched toward the defense table. Martin glanced to the judge, a rookie on the bench, who seemed startled by this breach of courtroom procedure. The judge hesitated, silent, jaw open. He reached for the gavel but seemed unsure if he should pound it.

Stokely ignored the mother until she was beside him. He shot her an uninterested glance. "Not looking at your pictures, lady," he mumbled.

Calmly she said, "Meet my son, Clarke."

She flipped the lid off the shoe box and cast the contents over the table. Pale ash, as fine as talc.u.m powder, flowed across the desk in a wave and poured into the laps of the two men. Particles swirled into the air, and seemed to come together as a ghost that brushed almost imperceptibly on bare skin.

"Jesus Christ!" Martin screamed. He bolted up. Ash clung to his suit. He tried to wipe away the stain, but his bare hands refused to touch it.

A few minutes before the opening of the will, Billy met the judges brother.

He was everything Gil Harmony had been, except less.

Judge Lincoln G. Harmony, six years younger than his brother, sat on the bench of the traffic tribunal, a maligned fiefdom of the judiciary, despised by Rhode Islanders summoned there for motor vehicle violations. Traffic court was the sweatshop of justice, where people waited hours on pine benches under buzzing fluorescent lights in steamy rooms with fake paneling on the walls, before their cases were brusquely called and disposed of with the grace of an a.s.sembly-line production.

"So you work for Martin Smothers?" Lincoln Harmony said. He had a big shock of wavy gray hair, and a sweaty palm. Billy freed himself from their handshake and casually wiped his hand on his pants.

"I help him out from time to time," Billy replied.

Lincoln Harmony wasnt listening. "Because I never imagined that Martin Smothers earned enough to hire full-time help," he said. His skin was pink and rough, as if scrubbed by a hard brush. His oily face gleamed wet under the hot lights in the law office. He struck Billy as a small-minded man of immense self-importance. He was accustomed to having his b.u.t.t kissed by lawyers and clerks and bad drivers, in the small pond of the traffic court.

"Sorry about your brother," Billy said, mostly to change the subject.

Lincoln Harmony waved a hand, as if to shoo some bug from around his head. "Tragic. Senseless. And beyond our power to change. What did the wise one say? 'The future, present, and the past. Fly on proud bird. Youre free at last. That was Confucius, I believe."

"I think that was the Charlie Daniels Band."

"Oh, whatever, Povich," he snapped. "The point is, Gil lived high and mighty, and now hes gone. If there is an afterlife, my brother has finally realized that money cant buy security, and accolades wont stop a bullet. He was mortal, like the rest of us. Imagine his shock."

He paused, smiled, showed teeth. Billy caught a whiff of alcohol, very faint, like the echo of an odor. Vodka, maybe?

"Dont look at me that way, Povich," he said in a low voice. "I loved my brother. Dont you think I know what I owe him?" He pointed to himself with a thumb. "Im on the bench because Im Gil Harmonys kid brother. I work four days a week, I got a pension coming my way in a few years thats worth more than most people will ever see. But Ive known for a long time that Gil was going to get knocked off Mount Olympus. Hed been up there too long. Its a shame he had to be knocked so hard."

Lincoln Harmony suddenly clapped Billy on the shoulder, as if telling him to buck up! He excused himself and wandered away, clipping his elbow on the door frame on his way out of the conference room. He recovered without a sound, and disappeared around the corner into the receptionists hallway, where the worlds slowest elevator made its stops on this floor.

Billy pulled out a winged leather chair on wheels and sat at the head of a long table that would fit a dozen people, though there were just seven chairs.

This would have been Gil Harmonys chair, he figured.

Though the judge had left the firm when he had been appointed to the bench, the law offices of Harmony & Thybony still carried his name. Billy had expected chandeliers and marble tile in Gil Harmonys law office, and was surprised by creaky floors and wall-to-wall carpet. This was a utilitarian s.p.a.ce, on the mid level of a three-story, brick-faced building, discreetly tucked among the office towers in Providences financial district. Between the tall buildings, the sky was a strip of gray. Rain was on the way.

The conference room windows looked out to an intersection paved in cobblestone. Across the square, a stone sultan hung like a gargoyle above the arched entrance of the Turks Head Building. The statue glowered at Billy and made him feel like he was being watched.

Billy closed one eye and pretended to aim a gun at the squinting stone statue, which had been chiseled nearly a century ago with angry features and a drooping mustache.

Lincoln Harmony had looked up to his brother all his life. Not that he had a choice.

When you drive past Respect, how far is Jealousy?

He turned when he heard the elevator bing. The steel doors crept open. Martin Smothers burst out as though he were shoved. He turned to a woman and a young man in the elevator and blurted, "Claustrophobia! It comes and goes." They followed him off the car. The woman sighed and pulled off a wide-brimmed safari hat. "Ill take that," Martin said, s.n.a.t.c.hing it from her. He looked around for a table or a hat rack, or something, and saw Billy.

"Povich!" he shouted. He flung the hat, Frisbee style, in Billys general direction. It sailed over the table and crashed into a set of Venetian blinds.

"Povich!" Martin shouted again. "You could have dived for it."

"Had this been a playoff game, I would have," Billy deadpanned. He stared at the woman, who watched him back, expressionless. She was very tall, close to six feet, with dark brown hair, nearly black, wound into a tight bun. Her cheekbones pressed sharply from beneath the skin; her mouth was an arch of red lipstick. Her light eyes hovered over blood-blue dark circles-the stains of stress or tears or insomnia. Her face looked tightened by emotion. Anger maybe? Even in anger, she was stunning. She looked to be chiseled by the same artist who had done the Turks Head across the street.

June Harmony, of course.

The dark-haired young man at her side was in his early twenties, a few inches shorter than June, with similar bone structure, similar eyes-this was her son, naturally. Billys eyes widened at the black slash up the young mans face-a row of surgical st.i.tches like train tracks that began at the jawbone, climbed past his ear, and disappeared under a baseball cap. The brown remnants of a fading s.h.i.+ner lingered under his eye.

Judge Harmonys son, Brock, was still recovering from the car crash that had killed his kidnapper and sent Stu Tracy to intensive care. Brock kept his hands in his pants pockets. He glanced around the office without looking anyone in the eye.

The woman said to Martin, "Do we wait in here?"

Martin pressed his hands together, as if praying. "You know your way around this firm. Why dont you check in with Mr. Thybony, in his office, so he knows were here." He chuckled, sounding nervous. "Ill get your hat."