William Lashner - Hostile witness

But there was a difference between my exposure of Tiffany LeGrand to Mrs. Osbourne and the exposure of the continuing relationship between Jimmy and Veronica to Mrs. Moore. I had exposed the exotic existence of Ms. LeGrand, destroyed a marriage, destroyed a man, spread pain and disillusionment, for money. I wouldn't do that again, I swore, not for mere riches, I swore, though all the time I was swearing I knew that mammon has its power over all of us. The photographs I had brought to Mrs. Moore were not about money, they were about a man's life, an innocent man in jail facing death, a man whom I had failed, and so, though I knew I was stooping, I would stoop as low as I was able. I had no more pride left, no more false notions of self-importance. I would crawl on my belly like a reptile if it would save Chester Concannon, and crawling I was.

By the time Renee had returned Leslie had fled the room, her thin writhing hands clutched around her neck.

"Where's Leslie gone off to now?" said a slurring Renee, with a half-empty highball glass in her hand.

"I don't know exactly," I said. "She told us to wait."

Renee looked at me and then at Slocum and then she spied the photographs still piled on the coffee table. She stepped over and sat down and went through them one by one, in reverse order, like watching a horror movie backwards.

"You bastards," she said. "You goddamn bastards." She stood up. "I won't let you get away with it."

As she was leaving the room Slocum said in his calm voice, "You know what obstruction of justice is, ma'am?"

She stopped and turned to stare at him.

"About five years is what it is," he said.

Before she could respond Leslie had come back into the room, clutching a crumpled brown paper bag. Her eyes were red, her face puffy from her tears so that her sharp cheekbones had softened. She threw the bag into my chest.

"Take it and go," she said.

I looked inside. It was a white shirt, crusted and torn, splattered with the dark maroon of dried blood. On the sleeve was embroidered JDM.

We took it and went.

"We'll send the shirt over to the lab," said Slocum as he let me out of the car outside my apartment. "Check out the blood. I'll let you know in a few days whether there's a match with Bissonette."

"It will match," I said. "Down to the last guanine rung of the DNA ladder."

"Even so, Concannon will still end up serving most of his federal time."

"I know," I said. "And between you and me, his fund-raising was more extortion than anything else, so it's not totally undeserved. But he shouldn't die for killing a man he didn't kill."

We looked at each other for a moment. "You did good tonight, Carl," said Slocum.

"Then how come I don't feel good?"

"You didn't tell that lady anything she didn't already know."

I shrugged sadly and headed up the steps to my building. Slocum was waiting for me to go inside, as if he were dropping off a baby-sitter. I opened the door to my vestibule and waved him away. The Chevette ground its gears and pulled off into the night.

When I turned to enter the vestibule Winston Osbourne was standing there before me, like the ghost of all my past transgressions.

"Victor. I've been waiting so long for you."

He was shaking with a ferocious chill, his hands jammed into his raincoat, his sallow, hollowed face staring at me, cocked at a crazed angle.

"Victor," he said in his shaky, lockjawed Brahmin voice. "I've come for my car. Give me back my car."

"Mr. Osbourne, Winston," I said once my nerves had settled from the surprise. "I'm glad to see you, actually. I have good news for you."

"Give me back my car."

I closed my eyes in sadness. "I'm sorry, Mr. Osbourne. It's been sold already. But the good news is that I've talked everything over with Mr. Sussman and he's willing to forgive the rest of your debt. I have to sign a few papers and satisfy the judgments on you, but then you'll be perfectly free to start over again."

"But where am I to go, Victor? How can I get from point A to point B without my father's car? It is a straight line, yes, a direct route, but I need my car to get there. What would you have me do, Victor?"

"There's always the subway."

"Don't mock me."

"I'm sorry, Mr. Osbourne. I truly am, more than you know. You look cold, not well. Come on upstairs and I'll make you some tea if you want. But with regard to your finances, there is nothing more I can do for you."

"You can give me back my car."

"I can't do that, it's been sold already and the new owners have good title under the law."

"Then you can waltz with me, Victor," he said and he pulled out a small, shiny automatic pistol from the pocket of his raincoat.

I stared at the pistol for a moment, the gun shaking wildly in his palsied hand, his opaque, striated fingernails grown even longer than I remembered. I was transfixed by the pistol until all the fear seemed to bleed out of me. I raised my head and looked into his eyes. They were sallow, shot through with lightning streaks of blood. They darted back and forth, as uncontrolled as his hand. Then I couldn't help myself. I started laughing.

While I had been feeling sorry for him he had been shooting at me. No wonder he missed, his hand shaking like that, uncontrollable, wild. It was too pathetic for me to even have considered before. But at the same time I realized there was a purer justice at work here than I could have fathomed. I should have realized long before that if I were to be killed it would not be the Jimmy Moores or the Enrico Raffaellos or even the Norvel Goodwins who would do the killing. It would be the scion of the Osbournes, the grandly Protestant, socially registered Osbournes, who would do me in. With a silver bullet, no doubt, for how else do you kill a Jew? And I deserved it, too, for the temerity to even consider joining their club. Here was Winston Osbourne, with his little pistol and his silver bullet, out to finish that dream forever, as if it could have survived my failures, as if I even wanted it anymore, as if it ever had worth. So I laughed, hard and loud. I threw my head back and laughed at everything I had ever wished for, ever wanted, all my deepest, shallowest desires. I stepped back and leaned against the wall of mailboxes and laughed.

It felt good, too, until he shot me.

THE GOOD NEWS, I suppose, is that it didn't kill me.

The bad news is that it really hurt a lot.

The bullet went into my chest just below my right shoulder and smashed through a few underdeveloped muscles, including the pectoralis minor, the name of which I considered an insult and tried to convince the doctor to change to something like pectoralis mucho grande, though she didn't seem amused. After it ripped through my pectoralis mucho grande the bullet hit a rib, bounced around a bit, and clipped off a piece of my right lung. That would explain the sucking sound I heard as I slid down the wall of the vestibule; it was air seeping out of my lung, causing a condition called pneumothorax. What happened then is that my lung filled with blood. That was like drowning in ten feet of water without needing goggles to see the world slipping away.

Winston Osbourne could have finished me off right there. I was not one of those heroes who, with a chest full of lead, was ready to fight his way out of a jam. One little.38 slug and I was slumped on the floor of the vestibule in shock, bleeding, breathing the sharp smell of saltpeter into my remaining operative lung, waiting to be finished off. But for some reason, maybe the tremendous report of the shot ringing in that tiny vestibule or the sight of me sliding down the wall with a bullet in my chest or the blood and urine pooling around me, I never knew, but for some reason after that first shot he ran.