David Corbett - The Devil’s Redhead

“I wasn’t the one who did it,” Abatangelo told her when he paid.

His next stop was within walking distance. Across the street from the I-80 skyway, the words ANTHONY J. COHN, ESQ., ATTORNEY-AT-LAW appeared in black Doric lettering upon the frosted glass door pane of a renovated Victorian.

Except for car keys and cash, the only thing in Abatangelo’s pocket at the time of his arrest in Oregon ten years earlier had been a slip of paper with Tony Cohn’s phone number on it. Cohn, though expensive, earned his fee. For three days at the preliminary hearing, the lawyer badgered the arresting agents into a squall of contradictions. They claimed an Anonymous Tipster had led them to Abatangelo and the others, when in fact one of the mutts on the beach crew had been their informant. The reason for the deceit was that an Anonymous Tipster, if he’s not a coconspirator, can remain anonymous forever. They didn’t want their snitch burned since he was working another grand jury out of Portland. The more they lied, the more Cohn hounded them. The government fished around for a good excuse, then just pointed fingers down the chain of command. Cohn, arguing fruit of the poisonous tree, managed to quash most of the informant’s testimony. But not all. Cohn explained the arbitrary nature of the ruling made for a good appeal issue, but at trial they stood to get hammered. This was, after all, rural Oregon, and rumors of the liberal northwest were greatly exaggerated. The jury pool was righteous and inbred. Worse, the defendants were Californian. Abatangelo didn’t need it explained twice. For the sake of reducing the heat on everyone else, he told Cohn to plead out, and Cohn got the best deal he could: a ten-and-five- ten years in prison, with five years probation tagged on because the U.S. Attorney deemed the defendant Of Malignant Character. As bad as it was, it beat risking the twenty-five-year stint he faced at trial, and gave everyone else the break he wanted. Especially Shel. Despite her limited involvement in the Company, the prosecutors were making her out as a full conspirator, using this as leverage against Abatangelo. Through Cohn, he tried to get her a single year, meaning with time served a few more months in prison at best. The feds would hear none of it. She gets three and a half like everybody else, they said, or we go to trial.

Cohn’s receptionist did not look up as Abatangelo entered the law office. The woman’s name was Joanna, an obese, compulsive woman who’d been fresh from community college when he’d seen her last, accompanying Cohn to hearings. She was adrift in her thirties now, and looking older still. As he recalled, she talked to herself. Conversing With The One Who Ought To Know, she called it.

He stood there several moments until finally, still looking down at her desktop, she said: “If you don’t state your business soon, I’m going to ask you to leave.” Her work area reeked of talcum powder. Abatangelo foresaw her developing a passion for cats, cutting her hair just a little bit shorter every year.

“It’s Dan,” he said. “Dan Abatangelo. I stopped by to tell Tony hello.”

Joanna jumped back in her seat as though bitten. “Good God.” She tried to compose herself, but an awkward, wincing smile lingered as she eyed him up and down. “Why didn’t you call first?” She made a fluttering upward gesture with her hand. The stairs. “Go on up. Tony will want to see you, I’m sure.”

Climbing the stairs, Abatangelo detected a new severity to the decor. The rugs were Persian. Tapestries lined the corridor. The track lighting was soft, discreet. Cohn had disclosed in his last few bits of legal correspondence that he was through with drug cases. The counterculture overtones were gone. No aging hippie élan, no Politics of the Mind, no laughs. Now spooks and professional paranoids were involved, only the small-fry got popped, thugs prevailed. There was a lot of death going around.

The door to his office was open, and Cohn stood in the middle of the room in his stocking feet. He was a short, wiry man to begin with and, shoeless, seemed even smaller, but the lack of size only served to enhance his intensity. The eyes were the same, fanatical and charming and vaguely wicked, but Abatangelo sensed something different, too. Immaculately groomed, meticulously dressed, he looked well-tuned but joyless. A winter tan helped obscure the weariness in his face. He held a fistful of paper, puzzling at another pile of paper on the floor.

Abatangelo announced himself with a knock on the door frame, saying as Cohn glanced up, “Back from the dead.” He came forward, shook the lawyer’s hand and smiled, feeling the architecture of thin bones, the ropy muscles, thinking- tennis. True sign of the arriviste; he’s taken up tennis.

Cohn stared dumbfounded. In time he managed to say, “Mirabile visu.”

Cohn was known to throw the Latin around. Jewish lads of his generation, he’d tell you, primed for a career in medicine or law, had little use for French or Spanish. This particular phrase meant: A wonder to be seen.

Abatangelo glanced around the room. “Same could be said for your digs.”

Buddhist phalluses and other fertility charms littered the shelves of a tea cabinet. A temple dragon, chiseled from sandalwood and large as an Airedale, glared from the corner. Above it hung a wool and burlap thing that looked like a french-fried bedspread.

“Apologize to Joanna for me,” Abatangelo said. “I think I frightened her.”

“You’re bigger than you used to be,” Cohn acknowledged, looking him up and down. He gestured as though to convey bulk. “And to be honest, you look a little harder than I remember.”

“Same old me,” Abatangelo assured him.

Cohn smiled. “If that’s so, prison ain’t what it’s cracked up to be.”

They shared a spate of uneasy laughter.

“You busy?” Abatangelo asked, gesturing to the clutter of papers across the floor.

“Labor omnia vincit,” Cohn replied. Latin again: Work vanquishes all.

Sensing an air of impatience, Abatangelo said, “I’ve got some pictures here. A bit of business, I guess. Shel Beaudry, you remember?”

Cohn flinched a little. “How could I forget?” he said. “You haven’t been in touch with her, of course.” On his desk, a small gold clock chimed discreetly.

“Through an intermediary,” Abatangelo lied. “She took it a little hard the other night.”

Cohn emitted an awkward laugh and sat down. “I suppose I’m going to hear about it.”

Abatangelo took out the pictures of Shel and set them down on the desk. Cohn reached out to collect them, wearing an expression of weary disgust. And yet there was an eagerness about him, too. A curiosity that helped Abatangelo come to a decision.

Driving over, he’d felt half-inclined to give up the notion of making Frank pay for what he’d done to Shel. There were already plenty of hounds out for the kill, though that guaranteed nothing, of course. He’d gathered from what Shel had told him that Frank had an unearthly knack for skating away from his own disasters. But so what? The argument went back and forth in his mind, and as it did he sensed, beneath the abstract moralities at issue, a vaguely sadistic urgency. Seeing Frank suffer, having a hand in it, would feel good. It would scratch a particularly fierce itch. Your motives are hardly pure, he told himself. Think about that.

He was struggling to sort all this out when he looked up and saw Cohn’s hand, strengthened by tennis, reaching across his desk for the photographs. A world came to life in that moment. It was a world in which men such as Cohn- educated, well connected, money in the bank- men who’ve suffered little more than frustration in their lives, enjoy the privilege of viewing photographs of a half-naked, brutally battered woman, doing so as they sit in a lavishly decorated room devoted to costly argument and filled with Third World kitsch. Men like that, they inhabited a realm devoted to one premise: It Isn’t Me. The luckless, the poor, the battered and preyed-upon. The Shel Beaudrys of the world, yearning for a break. They make bad choices . They show poor judgment . Pity the poor fuckers, tsk tsk, but never forget: It isn’t me.