William Lashner - Past Due

He put the fencing trophy back on the shelf but didn’t turn around to face us. And as he spoke the following words, his sharp voice grew sharper and his tall elegant frame seemed to contract upon itself, to deform itself, to hunch itself into a taut knot.

“The truth is, he was dealing with dangerous people, Mr. Carl. Maybe he didn’t know how dangerous. He was greedy, he always wanted more. He had made hundreds of thousands of dollars selling his poison, he had a beautiful girlfriend, he had the whole world at his feet, but it wasn’t enough. Tommy Greeley was hungry, ravenous, he wanted everything he could lay his grasping little hands upon and finally he took too much and paid the price.”

“Too much of what?” I said.

But before he could answer the door burst open and a green-eyed woman stepped into the office, stuck out her hip, flung her arms up to the sky like a showgirl jumping out of a cake. She was tall and slim, energetic, she was dressed like a gypsy with hoop earrings and a bandanna over her hair. Red gloves came down to her elbows, her frilly skirt came down to her ankles. In one raised hand was a bottle of champagne, in the other were two champagne flutes.

“Darling,” she said. “I have wondrous news. We simply must celebrate.”

I recognized her. She was the woman with the shy smile whose picture was in the slate frame, older now by a couple decades, but still her smile was bright, her face was all glittering angles, her eyes so glowed with vivacity and spirit it was as if she vibrated with some fierce energy. The proprietary way she stood in the doorway, the way she perfectly matched the exotic decor, stated without a doubt that she was the justice’s wife. But as he turned to her, still in that strange hunched posture, as he turned to gaze, startled, at his wife, his face held not the arrogance it had showed to us, or the bored, overfamiliar visage of the long married. No, as if one of the masks on his shelf had been pulled from his features to show the reality behind, his face was seething with emotion. There was passion, there was fascination and fear and disgust. And most of all there was love, pure and painful, innocent and imprisoning, a love that was strangely sad, perversely lonely, and absolutely abject.

His expression recovered quickly, the mask was replaced, the swirl of emotions that had flooded his features for a brief second disappeared as suddenly as it had come. And it was only later that I began to wonder if maybe, just maybe, in the powerful stream of emotions that hunched the justice’s posture and distorted his features, there lay not just a glimpse into the painful depths of a troubled marriage but also the seeds of a motive that might have cost Tommy Greeley and, yes, Joey Parma their lives.

WHATEVER WATERSI had expected to roil by my visit to a State Supreme Court justice, they didn’t take long to splash back into my face.

“That judge’s wife was so hitting on you, V,” said Kimberly, as we walked back to my office after our meeting with the justice.

“Don’t be ridiculous.”

“Oh, please. The way she was going, ‘Victor, Victor, darling,’ the way she insisted you stay for champagne, the way she laughed uproariously at all your jokes.”

“They were good jokes,” I said.

“Lame, V. They were tripping over their crutches. But she was laughing and fawning all over you like you were some Chippendale. And you were all, ‘Oh, Mrs. Straczynski’ this and ‘Oh, Mrs. Straczynski’ that and she was all, ‘Call me Alura, darling.’ It was a brutal display, V. Really. I was embarrassed for you.”

Kimberly was right that Alura Straczynski had been inappropriately flirtatious with me, but she was wrong that I had liked it. It more than made me wildly uncomfortable, it gave me the skives. The judge’s clerk, Curtis Lobban, had been invited to join the little party and he had stood in the corner the whole time, staring at me with his piercing gaze of flat contempt. And worse, as the justice’s wife leaned toward me and touched her throat, the justice himself was watching, carefully, with utter control, his face again a mask without an ounce of emotion.

“But did you believe what he told us?” she said.

“Yes, about not being part of the drug business, at least. His ambitions, even then, were too large to risk on something as stupid as dealing cocaine, no matter how lucrative, and the FBI was never able to link him to the organization. But I sensed that his connection to Tommy had been stronger than he let on and that there was some unfinished business.”

“About what?”

“That’s the question, isn’t it?”

“Well, he was lying about one thing,” said Kimberly.

“Really?”

“He said he didn’t watch television.”

“Maybe he doesn’t,”

“Oh yes, he does,” she said. “He went all Evita on us when he said it, like he was better than the rest of the world because he didn’t vegetate in front of the tube. But he watches, when the wife’s away playing her games, he watches, yes he does. And the bad stuff too.”

Just then we turned the corner and saw the suit. He was standing at the front door to my building, just under the big sign of the shoe. The man had a name, but the name wasn’t important, just the suit and the haircut and the way he pushed himself off the wall when he saw me, the way he flashed his credentials with a flip of the wrist.

“I’m supposed to walk you to the District Attorney’s office, Mr. Carl,” he said.

“What if I’m busy?”

“I was told you’re not that busy.”

“What if I refused, sat right down on the sidewalk, and sang ‘Freebird’ at the top of my lungs?”

“Then I’d have to have you arrested, Mr. Carl.”

“On what charge?”

“Singing Lynyrd Skynyrd without a shred of talent.”

“Fair enough. Should I bring a toothbrush?”

“Prudence might suggest so,” he said.

“Let’s leave her the hell out of it, shall we?”

“Are you finished trying to be clever, Mr. Carl?”

“Trying, huh? They hire you right out of law school?”

“Yes, they did.”

“Where’d you go?”

“Harvard.”

“Three years of Harvard and this is what they have you doing?”

“I’m so proud I could burst.”

“Okay, I’m yours. Lead on Macduff.”

“The name’s Berenson.”

“And don’t you forget it,” I said, even as I gave Kimberly a shrug and then let Berenson lead me back the way I had come, back to a dressing down at the DA’s office, where I’d be lucky if I was left, by the end of it, with even my boxers.

THE NINE BLOCKSbetween my shabby office and the District Attorney’s shabby offices were familiar ones. I had made that walk hundreds of times, knew every storefront deli between here and there, so the suit hadn’t been sent to make sure I didn’t get lost. And he hadn’t been sent to make sure I showed, a polite phone call would have done as much. I’m a polite guy, you’re polite with me, I’m polite with you, everything can be oh so polite. And that was the point, I understood perfectly, of the suit.

The DA’s offices were in an old YMCA, and I could still smell the sweat oozing out of the finely carved wood in the lobby. The suit used his magnetic card to open the glass door, signed me in, slapped a visitor sticker on my lapel, took me into the elevator, led me down the hallway of the seventh floor. He walked past the secretary, sitting at her station, and opened the door for me. I stopped at the secretary’s desk.

“Hello, Debbie,” I said.

“Hello, Mr. Carl.”

“Have you done something different with your hair?”