Hostile Witness Part 34

I just stared at him and waited.

He leaned forward and lowered his voice. "All right, I'm going to tell you something. I'm telling you this because I think there's a chance, small, but a chance you may be right. But if it comes back in my face in some motion or in a newspaper article I'm going to be very disappointed, do you understand? And you don't want to disappoint me."

He paused and took a drink from his beer.

"When we showed you the physical evidence," he continued, "we didn't show you everything. There was a book."

"Shakespeare?" I asked.

"More like Ma Bell."

"A phone book?"

"A personal phone book."

"You withheld Bissonette's little black book?"

"Now don't get like that," he said, raising a hand in protest. "The office made a determination that it wasn't appropriate to release Bissonette's personal phone book, as it might tend to embarra.s.s certain, how should I phrase this, certain well-known and highly placed women in the city. These women and their families have privacy rights. This wasn't like a hooker's book with the names of her johns. There were no crimes committed here."

"So there's this book." I pressed on.

"You want another beer?"

"Tell me about the book."

"I'd like another beer."

I raised my hand for the waitress like I was in grade school and ordered two more Rocks when she came. "All right," I said. "Tell me about the book."

"Well, this book has the names of the usual suspects, a lot of women with reputations."

"Let me see the book."

"Are you listening to me, Carl? I said we're not disclosing the book. There are names in there that if you saw them your jaw would drop to your knees, world-famous singers, athletes, wives of heavy politicians."

"Like Councilman Fontelli's."

"This was his book. But there aren't just phone numbers there. He rated them, gave them stars, one to five, like a d.a.m.n critic."

"Just like a baseball player to be obsessed with statistics. But that's good, then," I said. "We can use that book to find the girl he fell in love with. She was a five-star for sure."

"There's more than one five-star name."

"Just give me the five stars to check on, then."

"Some are just initials, some without numbers."

"Well, whoever this mystery woman is, it's someone in the book," I said. "A man falls in love, he puts the number in his book."

"You sound like you have a book of your own, Carl."

"More like a few paper slips with hand-scrawled numbers."

"You ever find a number you don't know whose it is?" asked Sloc.u.m, taking a long gulp from his beer, his eyes, behind his thick gla.s.ses, showing amus.e.m.e.nt.

"All the time."

"What do you do then?"

"I call it. 'h.e.l.lo, anyone there single and under fifty-five?'"

"Oh man," he said. "I can't tell you how glad I am to be married."

The waitress came with two more Rolling Rocks, the green long-necked bottles fogged with cold. "Two more," I said.

"So this is what I'm offering here," said Sloc.u.m after the waitress left. "You give me the name of any women whose possible involvement you're investigating and I'll tell you if she's in the book and her rating. You can take it from there."

"Linda Marie Raffaello Fontelli."

"Three stars," he said. "I would have figured more with all that practice..."

"How about Lauren Amber Guthrie?" I said quickly.

"Where did that name come from?"

"I recognized her photograph in the love box."

"And you withheld relevant information about a homicide from me?" He shook his head at me sadly. "I'll let you know if she's in there tomorrow. Any others, you just give me a call."

"Tell me something else," I said. "Tell me what you know about a drug dealer named Norvel Goodwin."

He stared at me for a long moment, took a drink from his beer, and then stared at me some more. "What the h.e.l.l are you into?" he asked finally.

I shrugged.

"Norvel Goodwin," he said, shaking his head. "One of the worst. We're onto him, but he's tough as h.e.l.l and he's got a good lawyer. Bolignari."

"Tony Baloney," I said. "I have a case with him."

"Well, no matter how good a lawyer Tony is, it's only a matter of time. You don't step up like he is stepping up without paying for it. He was big in West Philly for a while and then dropped out of sight."

"When Jimmy Moore burned him out?" I asked.

He gave me another long look. "That's right. Now he's back. There's been a lot of violence in the East Kensington Badlands as he pushes his way into other people's territories. Fights over street corners. The five-year-old who got a bullet in her head last week, cover of all the papers?"

"That was terrible."

"That was Goodwin. A stray bullet from just another fight over another corner. But all of a sudden Goodwin has a lot of muscle and he's taking over a lot of territory. He's a stone-cold killer." He shook his head. "What the h.e.l.l are you into now, Victor?"

I wouldn't have told him even if I knew.

37.

JOSIAH BLAINE WAS A shriveled old scoundrel who huddled before his rolltop desk late into the night in his second-floor law office two blocks away from the courts in City Hall. I'm speaking now of a different time, when the law was a less pervasive thing and a ten-thousand-dollar case was as big as they came. Josiah Blaine practiced law at the turn of the century, representing envelope makers and hat blockers, collections mostly, first the dunning letters and then the confessions of judgment, attachments of the bank accounts, foreclosures, all for fifty or a hundred dollars, plus interest, plus costs. He owned a building at 6th and Green in the old Jewish section and once a month, on the first of the month exactly, except on Sat.u.r.days when it was impossible to get the Jews to pay him because they couldn't touch money on Shabbos, an excuse to get away with an extra day he would have told you if you asked him or even if you hadn't, he would roam the hallways, bent at the waist, banging on the doors and shouting at Mr. Pearlstein and Mrs. Himmelfarb and Mr. Carlkovsky, my great-grandfather Carlkovsky, to come up with the rent or face eviction the very next day. His wanderings through the hall were in the early mornings, too early for his tenants to escape his dreaded monthly knock on the door. And true to his word, those who were late would find the men in their apartments hauling out the mattresses, rolling up the rugs, tossing pots out the window to the street, where they clanged to great effect, clearing the place for a new extended family that had come up with the deposit and first month's rent.

When Josiah Blaine grew too arthritic to march through the hallways of his slum on Green Street, he sponsored Everett c.o.x to the bar so he would have someone to collect his rents on the first of the month and to file his confessions of judgment with the court. When Everett c.o.x, incapacitated by great quant.i.ties of alcohol, found himself unable to rise early enough to effectively collect the rents, he hired Samuel Amber as a clerk to do it for him, promising to study him in the law, a promise he was unable to fulfill because of the great quant.i.ties of alcohol. But Amber studied on his own and it was finally Josiah Blaine, now over eighty and rapidly losing his mind, who sponsored him before the bar. It was this Amber, of the Bryn Mawr Ambers, though in those early days they were not then of elegant Bryn Mawr but of Fishtown, it was Amber, Lauren Amber Guthrie's great-grandfather Amber, who began to add some semblance of modernity to the office's practice of law. He hired clerks to do the menial labor, he bought drinks for fellow lawyers in the bars surrounding City Hall, he obtained a position with the city from which he was able, for a small percentage to the city solicitor, to shuttle a nice piece of the city's legal work to the firm. Everett c.o.x insisted that the firm hire his son, Everett Jr., who embezzled city funds, a crime that it cost a considerable amount for Amber to buy his firm out of, but there was now enough work for more clerks and more lawyers and eventually more partners. By the time Josiah Blaine died, mad as a hatter, threatening his nurses with eviction, the offices had moved to the Fidelity Building, a corner suite, and there were eight names on the door.

In the firm's offices now there was a painting, on the frame of which a bra.s.s nameplate read JOSIAH BLAINE, OUNDER. The face in the painting was n.o.ble, blue eyed, a ferocious moustache like the elder Holmes, a fine head of hair. It was a face of solidity, of propriety, a founder's face, but it was not the face of Josiah Blaine. Lauren Amber had told me the truth one late night as we lay together in my bed. Her great-grandfather had found the painting among the bric-a-brac of an estate he was administering and thought it projected the proper image.

On an afternoon when our trial was recessed due to a pressing engagement Judge Gimbel had with his dentist, I was sitting in a tapestried wing chair directly under that very painting of Josiah Blaine. The offices of Blaine, c.o.x, Amber and c.o.x were not in One Liberty Place but in one of the older, less obtrusive buildings in the city. Blaine, c.o.x was one of Philadelphia's older, less obtrusive law firms, with well-monied clients and estate lawyers managing the wealth of the city's grandest grandes dames. The firm's two hundred lawyers practiced respectfully, discreet litigation, sensible corporate work. The bankruptcy department was exiled to a lower floor so as not to make the corporate types nervous. There was something so solid in the dark wood paneling, something so white-shoed and blue-blooded, something so foreign to me that I felt as if the fake Josiah Blaine in the painting above my head was staring down at me with those cold blue eyes, demanding my monthly rent, threatening me with eviction if I didn't come through.

"Mr. Guthrie will see you now, Mr. Carl," said the receptionist. "He's sending his secretary up to get you."

That was the way they did it in the big firms, they sent emissaries for the visitors to summon them into the meetings. I didn't like being summoned, but Guthrie had said he wanted to meet and I had some questions to ask my dear former partner, a cuckold p.r.o.ne to violent rages, questions about his wife, from whom he had separated, and about a man with whom she was cheating while they were still together, a man who now was dead. I was out to find a murderer, so with the afternoon free I had told Ellie to set up the meeting and she had.

When the emissary from on high came I recognized her.

"h.e.l.lo, Carolyn," I said. She was a tall African-American, pretty, competent, and an awesome typist. I knew about the typing because she had been our secretary before Guthrie brought her to Blaine, c.o.x, along with the files he stole.

"It's good to see you, Mr. Carl," she said as she began to lead me through the wide hallways of her new firm.

"How are they treating you here?"

"They pay us for overtime."

"Terrific."

"And we work plenty of overtime."

I followed Carolyn through winding hallways of wood and secretaries, remarkably busy for seven in the evening. When Carolyn worked for us she was always out the door at 4:58 on the nose. "I have to catch the train," she'd say, "or there's nothing else to get me home at a reasonable hour." Now, getting paid for overtime, she seemed to have no trouble catching the later West Trenton Local. It's funny what a little thing like time-and-a-half will do to a train schedule.

"Guthrie, you b.a.s.t.a.r.d," I said after Carolyn had led me into his office.

"You look like c.r.a.p," he said.

"Thank you."

"Hey, what are friends for? Sit down, Vic. So this is your first time in my new digs, right? What do you think?"

What I thought was that this was everything I had ever wanted and I resented the h.e.l.l out of him for it. The big office, the leather couch, the burnished desk, the window overlooking City Hall, the freshly painted walls and fancy phone and computer on his desk for his e-mail. I recognized the painting behind his chair. I pointed at it and said, "Wasn't that in our offices?"

"As a matter of fact, yes."

"Excuse me a moment while I call the police. You must have stolen it along with the files."

He winked. "I'll messenger it over tomorrow if you want."

"I want. Along with the files."

"If only I could, Vic. Truthfully, they've been more headache than anything else. I'd love to dump them. But the clients all wanted to stick with me. h.e.l.l, there's more than enough work here to keep me busy."

"What about the Saltz case?"

"I asked Lou what he wanted to do and he said he thought I was a p.r.i.c.k for leaving and to let you have it."

"He said that?"

"What did I care, it was a dog. But I heard you got a settlement anyway. You guys ever find that accountant?"

"No."

"And a settlement even so. I should get a part of it, don't you think? After all, I brought it in. A referral fee?"

"Sue me."

"I don't sue friends, Vic."

"No, you just screw them in the a.s.s."

"Still sore, huh?"

"What gives you that idea?" I asked while looking out the window.

"Maybe I can make it up to you?"

"I never figured you for a suicide, Guthrie."

"So hostile, Vic? Have you considered therapy?"

"I'd rather buy a gun."

"It was only business. I understand Lizzie is finally hooking up with Community Legal Services."

Word traveled fast, especially when the word was bad and it was about me. I didn't want to go into the whole sorry mess, especially not with Guthrie. "It's a consentual thing," I explained. "I've been doing more criminal and investment work than she felt comfortable with. When she found they had an opening she decided she would take it."

"That's terrific for her," said Guthrie. "It's where Lizzie belonged all along. And it makes what I wanted to meet with you about easier for everyone. The reason I wanted to get together is that Tom Bismark was asking about you. You know Tom? The managing partner here?"

"I don't think so," I said, though I did. Not personally, the Tom Bismarks of the city didn't waste their time with second-raters like me, but I had seen him in one of the bars with Jimmy. He had been out with his wife, cheating on his mistress, or so Jimmy had said.

"Tom caught you on the news with this trial of yours, the Jimmy Moore case. How did you get that, anyway?"

"They scoured the city for the most desperate shyster they could find and my name naturally came up."