What if he is? “No, it won’t.”
“Well, I, for one, won’t hang a federal judge out to dry. The networks are all over the story, so are the newspapers. Rita, we go back a long time. I’m asking you as a personal favor to keep the case.”
“Why?”
“For the publicity, dopey,” Tobin said.
I looked at Mack for confirmation, and his smile was already broadening. “I told you, I had forty calls yesterday. Forty—count ’em—forty. One was from Good Morning America. Federal judge kills secretary? We’re talking national exposure here!”
“Allegedly kills secretary,” Tobin added.
Mack laughed. “We’re on a roll with this, Rita. I even hired a public relations firm to manage it. It’s a gold mine.”
Wait a minute. The unsayable needed saying. “But what if Fiske really is the killer?”
They both looked at me blankly. “So what?” Tobin said, and Mack nodded.
I was dumbfounded. “It cuts both ways, boys. It could be bad publicity.”
Mack laughed. “Ain’t no such thing, kid.”
“I second that emotion,” Tobin said.
I looked at them and realized that as long as lawyers like this were around, I would always be second-best.
And I’d never even been to Cincinnati.
10
The tiny, cluttered kitchenette in back of the butcher shop filled with the smell of cholesterol as my father shook a crackling pan of homemade sausage. He was wearing his I’M ITALIAN AND YOU’RE NOT apron, but I couldn’t read the front. All I could see was his thick back, which ended in a white ribbon tied over baggy white pants. The silent treatment again.
“So, Dad, explain this to me. You’re pissed when I decide to represent the judge, then you’re pissed when I want out? What is it? My aftershave?”
LeVonne, who had been rocking his fork by pressing on the tines, laughed softly. He ate with my father every morning at this ancient white drop-leaf, where they both pretended that LeVonne had eaten already and was just keeping my father company.
“You laughin’, Professor?” my father said, without turning around. “I hope not, because it’s not funny. Everything’s a big joke with her.”
“Who, me? Aren’t you going to call me Miss Fresh?”
The only response was the sausage’s. It sputtered, releasing an aromatic smoke of olive oil, fresh garlic, and green pepper.
“Come on, Dad, I like it when you call me Miss Fresh. Then I know it’s you and not some Vito impersonator.” I turned to LeVonne. “LeVonne, what do you think? Is it really him? It must be, who else would wear that apron?”
LeVonne’s smooth lips tightened to hold back his smile. He looked fresh this morning in an oversized T-shirt with a faded picture of Kriss Kross on it. A gentle crease between the twins told me the shirt had been ironed. I wondered who had ironed it, for his parents were long gone and it was all his grandmother could do to get him to my father’s. It occurred to me there was a lot I didn’t know about LeVonne.
“LeVonne, will you talk to me at least? What grade are you in now? Tenth?”
He nodded and looked down at his heavy white plate. Being totally empty, the plate couldn’t have held his interest for more than a moment, but he stared at it, saying nothing, while the sausage sizzled along with my father.
“You like school, LeVonne?”
He shrugged.
“Are you going to take a language next year?”
He shook his head.
I’m usually a better conversationalist than this. “LeVonne, I’ve been meaning to tell you I like your … uh, what do you call that, a beard? Are you growing a beard?”
He touched his chin, self-conscious.
“Do you call it a beard? Or what?” Just to see if he’d talk.
“S’whatever,” LeVonne said.
“It’s a goatee,” snapped my father. “A beard goes all the way around.”
Thanks, Dad. “Well, whatever it’s called, I like it.”
LeVonne hung his head even farther, until his chin was practically buried between Kriss Kross’s steam-ironed, backward baseball caps.
“I like it, too,” my father said.
“I said it first, Pop. So that makes me a nicer person than you.”
“Hmph.” He jiggled the pan.
“In fact, I’m such a good person that when I have a guest to breakfast I do not turn my back on them until I get my own way.” The sausage popped loudly. “Hear that, Dad? The meat gods agree.”
LeVonne laughed, almost a child’s giggle. He covered his mouth but the giggle persisted. My father pivoted and speared the air between us with the tines of the cooking fork. “It’s not my own way, it’s the right way.”
“What’s the right way?”
“The right way is you finish what you started. The judge could be charged with murder. You told him you’d defend him, you defend him.”
“I said I’d defend him against sexual harassment, not murder.”
He punched up his glasses with his wrist. “You said you’d be his lawyer, you’re his lawyer. Finish what you started.”
“But what if I shouldn’t have started it? What if he was using me, like you said?”
“It don’t matter.”
“Can’t I change my mind? Maybe you were right in the first place, Dad.”
He straightened himself to his full height, which was five foot five. “I was right. I was right the first time and I’m right the second time, too. You don’t quit just because it’s tougher than you thought.” He drew a horizontal line in the air with the fork. I had no idea what this meant, except maybe it was the thirty-eighth parallel and I was North Korea and he was South.
“It’s not that simple, Dad.”
“No? Why not?”
“It’s not getting tougher, it’s getting different.”
He turned to LeVonne and pointed to him with the fork. “Do you understand what that means, Mr. President?”
LeVonne shook his head.
“It means it’s not what I bargained for, Dad. I’m not a criminal lawyer. What’s the matter with getting the judge a good criminal lawyer?”
“It’s wrong!”
“Why?”
“General principles.”
“General principles?” I smacked myself in the forehead. “How could I forget about general principles?”
“Go ahead, make fun.”
“You should write the general principles down somewhere, Dad, like they do with the United States Code. This way we could all look them up and know how to live. We wouldn’t have to come to Ninth Street every time we had a question. Think of the time it would save us!”
He shook the fork at me. “You could visit more. It’s not the worst thing.”
I rubbed my eyes and began to wonder why I had come. Had I really thought he could help? I didn’t even eat sausage. “Now, getting back to general principles. Which general principle is it we’re talking about? There are so many, and you can never find the index.”
“You know which one, Miss Wiseguy.”
“No, I don’t. I didn’t take general principles in law school. Maybe it was an elective?”
LeVonne turned around in his seat, facing almost backward out the screen door to the tiny cement back of the store’s lot. I don’t know what he was looking at, there was nothing in the back except a cinderblock wall, two battered garbage cans, and a fig tree growing out of the concrete floor. Come to think of it, it was something to see.
“The principle, Miss, is that you don’t quit. I didn’t raise a quitter. That’s what I’m saying.”
“Why does it come down to what you raised? This has nothing to do with you. Whatever decision I make, it doesn’t reflect on you.”
“Of course it does. Everything I do, everything you do … what did you say? What was that word?”
“Reflects?”
“Reflects on each other. On all of us.” He made a circle in the air with the fork, and I figur
ed we were talking the entire globe now, not just Korea. “It all reflects on us. Everything reflects on us. Our family name.”
“Our what?” The concept was so ludicrous I couldn’t repeat it. “We’re the Morrones, not the Kennedys. Not the Rockefellers.”
He slammed the fork down on the spoon rest. “Where did you get the idea that you have to have money to have a family name?”
His vehemence took me aback, and LeVonne shifted farther out the back door.
“Wherever you got it, it was wrong! We do have a family name—Morrone. It was my father’s name, and he came and started this shop in 1914. He was one of the first to come over, to come to the Market. My father, Vito Morrone, Senior. Your grandfather, you understand me?”
“Sure, but—”
“He had a name, and it counted as much as anybody else’s, and everybody respected it. He never disgraced it. When he couldn’t get hired at an inside job he started his own shop. He and my mother worked in it every day until they died. My father, he never gave up and never, ever quit. That’s what I’m doing here and that’s what LeVonne’s doing here,” he said, red in the face under his fresh shave.
“Dad, relax.”
“We’re all making our own name here. Nobody gave it to us, and we’re making it every day. So are you. You don’t disgrace it. You don’t run away.” He turned his back on me, picked up the fork, and jabbed it into the sausage. The meat spat in protest. Black smoke rose from the pan. Burned.
I felt a light touch on my arm.
LeVonne. His fingers were slim, his hand looked like a nimble spider against the white table. He shook his head, no.
“What?” I mouthed to him silently.
His almost-black gaze slid over to the left. I followed his eyes to the photographs on the wall, speared with steel tacks to a bulletin board of crumbling cork. I’d stopped noticing the pictures long ago: my father’s old mutt, me at Holy Communion, my grandfather and grandmother, with maybe three teeth between them. But I sensed which picture LeVonne meant, and it was none of those.
Her hair was a white-gold swirl behind her head, her wedding dress was a white-gold swirl at her feet. My father towered over her in the photo, he must have been standing on a stepladder. His jacket was a rented white, his hair two wings of pomade. He looked like a lovestruck young man who would never believe the lithe woman at his side would someday run away.
My father never spoke of her, and I’d stopped pressing him to. I didn’t know why she left until one of the Espositos told me, when I was ten, that it was Another Man. Before that, I thought it was because she was Canadian, since Jimmy DiNardo said it wouldn’t have happened if my father had married an Italian girl instead of a Canadian girl. My child’s mind assumed that Canada was an exotic country, which accounted for my mother’s singular looks and manners. Even her clothes were different; stiff linen dresses, orange capri pants, midriff tops that tied at the bellybutton. She was the talk of the Market, but I had not associated disgrace with what she did to my father until this very minute. He protected me from that, as he did from the fact that she died shortly after she left.
And it took LeVonne, who was stone silent, to explain my own father to me. I glanced back at LeVonne. His head was cocked as if he were listening. His dark eyes moved over my father’s back, seeming to scan his posture and stance for clues.
I watched my father, too, then. I listened as he snapped off the gas and reshuffled the sticky sausage. And after he had tended the sausage forever and I couldn’t stand wondering why he wouldn’t turn around, I made a silent promise to him, or more accurately, to his back. I wouldn’t quit the Hamilton representation, no matter what. There would be no running away. Not anymore.
After all, I had a family name to uphold.
Not Rockefeller. Not Kennedy. Morrone.
On general principles, no less.
When I got back to the office, my secretary, Janine, was sitting at my desk. Her black clogs were crossed on my mail and she was yapping away on my telephone. Janine Altman was a complete slacker except when a telephone receiver made contact with her triple-pierced ear. Then she’d twist her penny-red hair around a bitten-off fingernail and chatter away, animated as Ann-Margret on the telephone in Bye-Bye Birdie. I kept Janine on because I was raising her to be a responsible adult, which was why I reached over and rudely pressed down the telephone hook.
“What’s the story, morning glory?” I said to her. “What’s the tale, nightingale?”
Her purple-lipsticked mouth dropped open. “Rita?” she said, scrambling to sit up straight. “Why’d you do that?”
“Child, I’ve asked you not to make drug deals from my phone. Can’t you use your own?”
“It wasn’t a personal call?” she said with her characteristic inflection. Every statement she made sounded like a question. It drove me nuts.
“Janine, are you asking me something or telling me something?”
“Telling you something? I was talking to Judge Hamilton on the phone? He says to come quick?”
I felt my stomach leapfrog. “What?”
“He’s been arrested? He’s in jail?”
Christ. “Where?”
She consulted a yellow message slip. “At the police station in Radnor Township?” She thumbed through the other slips on the pad underneath. “Before that the Inquirer called and the Daily News? And Jim Hart, you know, that reporter from Channel 10? The one with the hair?”
“The press? Do they know about the arrest?”
She nodded. “Yes?”
Shit. “You told them all no comment, right?”
She looked guilt-stricken under her alternative makeup.
“What did you do, Janine?”
“Nothing?”
“Tell me you didn’t talk to the press.”
“Just Hart?” She cringed, as if awaiting the blow I was actually considering.
“What did you tell him?”
“My phone number?”
I took in some oxygen, but not much. “Janine, don’t talk to the reporters. Don’t date the reporters. Don’t feed the reporters. The shit is about to hit the fan, capisce?”
“But he’s so hot?”
Someday I would give up on her. “I’m sure,” I said, and threw a legal pad and a copy of the Pennsylvania Crimes Code into my briefcase.
“I’m sorry?”
“Do something secretarial for me. Call Mack and tell him to assign some young genius to my cases. And tell him I said ‘pay up.’”
“Okay?” She made a note in pen on the palm of her hand. Another thing I’d asked her not to do.
“Then cancel everybody today. And tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow, too?”
I snapped my briefcase closed and grabbed my bag. “And tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow. You ever hear that before? You know what that’s from?”
“Macbeth?”
I did a double-take. “Right.”
She grinned crookedly and held up her hand. On her palm it said, YOUNG GENIUS.
11
The route to Radnor Township Police Station winds through the most expensive wilderness west of Philadelphia and is dotted with stone mansions set so far from their mailboxes it could be another zip code. Residents call this costly forest “hunt country” and I believe they hunt foxes here, not Italians or other critters.
If I didn’t have a client arrested for murder, I might have enjoyed the drive, with the hand-stitched steering wheel sliding through my fingers and my car taking the curves like it was glued to the asphalt. Instead I was trying to remember the elements of the crime of murder as I whipped past the mailboxes, their tasteful white lettering echoing names on the SIGN HERE line of the Declaration of Independence.
Hancock, Morris, Lynch.
I tried to reach Kate on my car phone to tell her what was going on, but there was no answer, and no answering machine. Kate loathed them, lumping them with such abominations as VCRs, personal computers, and ballpoint pens.
Wolcott, Clark, Stone.
Kate would be tough enough to weather this, I’d seen her attack ivy like the Terminator. I guessed she wouldn’t be at the police station. Fiske protected her, by tradition and instinct, and she seemed content in this arrangement. I’d always thought their marriage had a comfy, natural-order feel to it, like a faithful pairing of loons. Shows you how much I know.
Adams, Ross, Smith.
I tried to reach Paul, too, but he wasn’t at his office or at home. I called on the car phone, but no luck. I tried not to think about where he was, what he was doing, or who he was doing it with. I had to bail his father out of jail. I punched the end button on the car phone again for no reason at all.
Wilson, Taylor, Chase.
I caught sight of the police station at the fringe of the woods behind a huge, well-maintained baseball field. I came to a full stop when I saw the commotion.
ABC, NBC, CBS.
The baseball field was empty of Little Leaguers, whose families had fled the steamy tarmac of their circular driveways for beach houses. Reporters had taken their place, alleged adults with cameras and microphones. White TV news vans with flashy logos were parked in the station lot, their silvery satellite dishes reflecting the midday sunshine. Even the playground was overrun by the media and their shiny toys.
I took a deep breath, gunned all six of my Teutonic cylinders, and drove down the road and into the parking lot. I ignored the camera flashes and videocameras that recorded my car’s excellent handling. I pulled into the first illegal space and the reporters were on me almost before I cut the ignition.
From a woman reporter with a dictaphone: “Miss Morrone, do you have any comment on the judge’s arrest?”
How about shit, piss, and fuck? “No comment.”
From a slick TV reporter: “People are saying the judge should step down from the bench. Will he?”
Are you kidding? “Why should he? Judge Hamilton is one of the best judges on the district court. We need him.”
From a Connie Chung knock-off: “How will this affect the lawsuit for sexual harassment?”