William Lashner - Marked Man

She tilted her head, tightened her lips.

“Do you like long walks in the misting summer rain?”

“With my dog,” she said.

After she stalked out, her briefcase banging the doorjamb for emphasis, I remained seated at the table with Slocum.

“Do you have any idea what she’s looking for?” I said.

“None.”

“Don’t you think you should find out? Maybe climb the chain of command to discover what’s really going on?”

“You want to hear something puzzling, Carl? The attorney general of the United States doesn’t return my calls.”

“A shocking breach of decorum.”

“Yes, it is. I would complain, but the vice president doesn’t return my calls either.”

“She’s after something.”

“Evidently.”

“Did you notice that when she talks, she doesn’t really move her lips? Like she’s a ventriloquist.”

“I noticed.”

“It’s a little frightening,” I said.

“She’s a frightening young lady.”

“And, you know, from a distance she looks so sweet.”

Rhonda Harris and herlittle notebook were waiting for me outside the courthouse. How she knew I was at the courthouse was a bit problematic, but the sight of her in her dark pants and white blouse, her green scarf, her long legs and red hair pulled back, brushed that niggling question aside. She looked oh, so Katharine Hepburn I half expected her to break into a quavering Yankee accent as she called me her knight in shining armor.

“Mr. Carl, I hope I’m not disturbing you.”

“Not at all,” I said. “It’s gratifying to see the working press working. But unfortunately, right now, and for the foreseeable future, I have no further comment on anything.”

“Really? That’s so out of character.”

“We all must change with the times. I know it’s a grave disappointment.”

“Not really. Your comments didn’t quite grind the presses to a halt.”

I checked my watch. “I have to get a move on. I’m due in landlord-tenant court.”

“Can I walk with you a bit?”

“Only if what we say is off the record.”

She put away her notebook, lifted her hands like a magician to show there was nothing here, nothing there, nothing up her sleeve.

“Come along, then,” I said. “How’s the story going?”

“Fine, sort of. My editor says he needs more detail and more human interest.”

“I’m not an interesting enough human for your editor?”

“He told me I need to interview Charlie.”

“That’s a shame, isn’t it? I really liked your Thomas Wolfe angle.”

“How can we arrange an interview?”

“We can’t.”

“Oh, everything can be arranged somehow, can’t it?”

“Not this.”

“Give me a chance, Victor. I’ll only write the most complimentary things. And I’ll give you approval over your client’s quotes if you want. I’m sure the public will find Charlie’s story fascinating.”

“It is, I assure you. But as of today the Victor Carl-Charlie Kalakos media machine has been shut down. And I wouldn’t have let you interview Charlie in any event.”

“But doesn’t he have the right to have his say?”

“At the appropriate time, sure. This isn’t it.”

“You know, Victor, if I could have an exclusive interview with Charlie, I could get this thing splashed on the front page of Newsday. Newsday ’s feature articles are picked up by papers all over the country. The publicity would be out of bounds. The morning shows would be calling. You could become the next Johnnie Cochran.”

“I always admired Johnnie. Hardly anyone looks good in a black knit cap, but he pulled it off with style.”

“Maybe after the article you could charge as much as he did.”

“So now you’re appealing to both my pathetic hunger for fame and my venality.”

“Is it working?”

“Can I ask you a question? The man you saw in my office. Did you know him?”

“That little gnome? No, thank God.”

“Why ‘thank God’?”

“Didn’t you sense it, the violence in him? I did. I’ve seen enough of that sort in my life. What did he want?”

“He was appealing to my venality, too. It seems to be a disturbing pattern.”

“Then maybe there is something else I can appeal to.”

“Rhonda, are you propositioning me?”

“Oh, Victor. Don’t be silly. It’s just a story.”

“Too bad.”

“What I meant is that maybe I could appeal to your sense of charity. I’ve been fighting to break through at my newspaper for a while. I fell into this business late, and it’s hard being a stringer, but my editor said if I can make this story happen, he’d push to hire me full-time. All I need to make it happen is an interview with Charlie. In person if I can, by phone if I have to. You would be giving a huge break to a struggling reporter.”

“We all have our jobs to do, Rhonda.”

She gently took hold of my biceps, gave me a tug. “Please, Victor. I really need this.”

I stopped, turned toward her, saw her green eyes swell with hope, and I felt an ache. It frightened me what I felt, an ache of wanting. She was a reporter – a life-form lower than a ferret, lower even than a lawyer – and I had no doubt but that she was trying to manipulate me for her own ends, anything for a story, but still I felt the ache. And yes, she was pretty, and yes, I liked her offhand manner, and yes, she treated me with an appealing lack of respect, but no, even then I could discern that my feelings had little to do with the truth of her inner being and everything to do with some pathetic need of my own.

I had felt the same ache for a bicyclist with long blond hair and pretty pink riding shoes who had asked for directions on the parkway. And before that I had felt it for a woman in a short black skirt whom I had spied across the street and who, without bending her legs, had leaned down to tighten the laces on her bulky black shoe. I could walk along the street during my lunch hour and fall in love a dozen times and feel the ache as each woman strode on through her life without me. And it was undoubtedly the same ache that had driven me, insensible with drink, to tattoo a stranger’s name upon my chest in a declaration of love.

Either I was a wildly warm and openhearted person or my life was in serious trouble. And, unfortunately, I am not that warm and openhearted a guy.

Yet still, even if all those other supposed emotional connections were the result of some existential psychosis of the soul, who was to say that this emotion, the one I was feeling right now toward this woman with the blazing red hair and freckled face, might not be the real deal?

“Rhonda,” I said with a slight stutter, “maybe we can go out sometime and get a drink.”

She slipped on a sly smile. “Does that mean…?”

“We’ll talk about it over a drink. And maybe, if everything feels right and the circumstances allow it, maybe I’ll talk to my client about you and your article.”

“That would be just so great, Victor,” she said. “Thank you, thank you so much. When?”

“I’ll get back to you,” I said. I glanced again at my watch. “But right now I have an eviction to fight.”

There are about fiftycases on the list each day in Courtroom 500 on South Eleventh Street, the city’s housing court, yet only about three of those cases ever get tried. Instead most business is conducted, as in all courthouses, in the hallways, which is where Beth and I stood before our hearing when we were approached by a man with blond hair and a snappy green suit. About my age, but you could tell he had climbed higher on the legal ladder, which meant that I disliked him right off.