William Lashner - Hostile witness

There were seven of us at a large, round table in DiLullo's, having just finished a lavish meal. Next to Jimmy sat his wife, Leslie, grasping tightly to the stem of her champagne glass, the puffed shoulders of her bright red dress shining like huge apples. She was still a pretty woman, auburn hair done up in all kinds of wing things, smooth shiny skin tight over sharp cheekbones, a dramatic neck, but the years with Jimmy Moore's passion had clearly not been easy ones and her face showed the wear. Next to Leslie Moore was her sister, Renee, a heavier, more bitter version of Mrs. Moore, whose mission in life, it appeared, was to keep Leslie's champagne glass filled. Then sat Chuckie Lamb, Concannon, myself, and Prescott, who had encouraged me to have the champagne but had taken none for himself. Jimmy Moore was holding court here, his voice loud and rich, his strong large hand warmly shaking those of his admirers as they came to the table paying respect.

"The mayor thinks he can destroy my reputation with this indictment, but he's dreaming. Dreaming. His stooges in the so-called Department of Justice can try to sully my name, they can drag me through their mud, hell let them. Let them. I got enough to kick their butts halfway to Jersey and still become mayor. They all think I'm doing this with mirrors, my numbers rising like a rocket ship, my fund-raising shooting through the roof. Over two million in the last year for CUP, my group, not to mention the fat stream of donations I have going for my youth treatment centers. And let me tell you something, I got some big guns giving, sure, but I get more ten dollar donations, twenty dollars, fifty dollars, more than anybody. Nobody understands it. Nobody. I was just a normal political hack like every other slob in City Hall when Nadine died, just another grubby councilman looking for his piece of the pie. But when she died, when they killed her with their poisons, murdered her, fuck. Fuck."

He slammed his cigarette into an ashtray and lit another with his gold lighter. Leslie Moore drained her glass of champagne and reached for the bottle herself. There was a long silence. The Moores' daughter, Nadine, had died of an overdose of barbiturates, it was in all the papers five or six years back, a teenager still when she started playing around with a dangerous crowd, experimenting with whatever was available. And then one night at a party, after too much cocaine and too many of the wrong pills, she collapsed and died. Moore was on the evening news, crying first and then shouting about vengeance, railing at the drug dealers who were destroying the city's youth. A few weeks later he started his campaign to wipe them out, neighborhood by neighborhood, crack house by crack house. There were marches, there were raids, there were mysterious fires and unexplained deaths. He had started a war.

After a drag from his cigarette, Moore continued. "I've been building my new coalition day by day. I speak in the neighborhoods, I do the good work, I open the athletic centers, the shelters, my youth treatment centers, but it's not the speeches, it's not the buildings, it's not the programs that draw my support. These people, they look into my eyes and you know what they see?"

"Their taxes being raised," said Prescott.

Jimmy Moore laughed, a genuine, head thrown back laugh. "My lawyer the Republican wouldn't vote for me on a bet, I know that."

"I can't vote for you," Prescott said. "I live in Merion."

"Of course you do. But I didn't hire you for your vote. I hired you because you're going to kick the government's ass."

"We'll do what we can."

"No, you'll do what you have to. But let me tell you, Bill. What the people see in my eyes is real. It can't be faked. You won't find a white politician in the entire country with the following I have in the black community and that's because they know the pain I've felt, they know the hate I feel, they know I will rid them of their greatest threat or die trying. What they see is my passion."

He leaned over and draped one of his thick, tightly clothed arms over his wife's shoulders.

"It's no different than what I felt when I first saw Leslie, standing in that crowd outside the schoolyard, with her little Catholic school skirt and her saddle shoes. She was so shy, she was, hiding out at the back of the group, unable to meet my stare from the other side of the fence. I was in my football uniform when I first saw her, on the practice field, and my passion spoke and I knew. I wouldn't let anything get in the way. Not her mother, not her little private school boyfriend with the fancy sweaters. Nothing."

"And nothing did," said Leslie Moore without even the hint of a smile.

"That's right," said Moore. "Remember the flowers and jewelry and poems, those marvelous rich poems?"

"Cribbed," said Mrs. Moore's sister, Renee. "You couldn't even write your own love poems to Leslie."

"I was not as sharp with words in my youth as I have since become," said Jimmy. "And John Donne expressed what I was feeling far better than I could have then." He gazed into his wife's eyes and recited, "'Twice or thrice I have loved thee, before I knew thy face or name.'"

Mrs. Moore took another drink from her glass.

"What happened to the boy with the sweaters?" I asked. Chuckie Lamb, who was in the middle of a champagne gulp, coughed the bubbles loudly out his nose and fumbled for a napkin.

"Richard Simpson," said Mrs. Moore. "Sweet Richard Simpson. He was such a nice boy. Refined."

"He stopped coming around after we started together," said Moore, turning to greet a stooped, grayed man who passed by our table. "Judge," he said loudly to the man.

"You broke his jaw," said Renee.

"Judge Westcock," said Moore, reaching out to shake the old man's hand. "You're looking better than ever, you fox." The judge's palm pressed into the back of a pretty young woman as he spoke warmly with Moore, the conversation at our table stopping cold until Moore was free again to lead it. Every few minutes someone of import stopped by to shake the councilman's hand and whisper in his ear, and during these interludes we waited until Moore could once again turn his attention back to the table. I knew the names of many of the people who came, basketball players and politicians and local names from every stratum. It was as if this table at DiLullo's was the councilman's after-hours office, where he could always be reached and deals always be cut.

"Funny," said Chuckie after the judge left. "That didn't look like Mrs. Westcock."

"She's about fifty pounds lighter and fifty years younger than Mrs. Westcock," said Jimmy Moore, laughing.

"I'm tired," said Mrs. Moore.

Moore lifted the champagne bottle out of its silver bucket and poured what was left into Mrs. Moore's glass. "That will perk you up, it always does. Chuckie, get another bottle."

Chuckie Lamb pressed his lips together and said, "Yes, Councilman," before ducking away from the table to find a waiter. This would be our fourth bottle, and though the plan had been to grab a quick dinner before heading back to join the Talbott, Kittredge team at work, the champagne had successfully numbed our desire to deal with the piles of paper waiting for us at Prescott's office.

"What kind of name is Carl?" asked Moore, turning his attention at me.

"My family is Jewish," I said.

"So you're a Jew," he said in a voice so loud I shrunk from it. He might as well have been a druggist asking for the whole store to hear whether I wanted ribbed or lubricated.

"I'm sort of nothing, but my family is Jewish."

"It's good we have some diversity now. Prescott's a fine lawyer but WASPs have such thin blood. It's that northern heritage, all those millennia shivering atop Scandinavian glaciers. There's no passion bubbling through his veins, just cool calculation. But the Jews are a Semitic people, your blood was thickened in the heat of the Egyptian desert and the centuries settling beside the Mediterranean."