Steve Martini - Compelling Evidence

By evening, the “K” Street Mall will be given over to its other occupants, an assortment of vagrants, winos, and the scattered homeless. They will wander through the city center on an aimless sojourn between the squalid liquor stores of “J” Street and meals at the rescue mission a dozen blocks to the north. I burrow into the standing crowd stalled at the signalized intersection on Tenth Street. A panhandler works the captive audience at the light with the fluidity of a maestro, his quarry driven by an uneasy embarrassment to a state of feigned inattention. The light changes, the crowd moves, and the beggar drifts off under the shadowed awning to the littered doorway of the five-and-dime to await the next, inevitable cycle of traffic.

The University Club is housed in a majestic white Victorian. Built as a residence for a railroad magnate during the last century, the structure has served over the years as a private home for wayward girls, a restaurant, and more recently, a funeral parlor. It was rescued from the wrecker’s ball two years ago by the University Club and its board of directors, and now hosts the regular meetings of a raft of civic organizations including the Capitol City Bar Association. Attendance at the bar’s meetings is practically mandatory, an opportunity to rub shoulders with the judges and glean referrals from other attorneys.

It’s a packed house, standing room only in the walnut-paneled parlor that now serves as the bar. I wedge my way through the crowd, a half-dozen drink tickets in hand.

There’s a little elbowing and jockeying for position. I order and retreat from the bar, a drink in each hand, to settle into a cushioned club chair in the lounge.

“Missed ya at the funeral.” It’s a gravelly voice. I look up. Tony Skarpellos was Ben’s partner, and for all purposes now stands to inherit Potter’s influence, the balance of sway in the firm.

“Tony, how are you?”

“Didn’t see you there, the funeral,” he says.

“How could you miss me in that sea of humanity?” I say.

“Ah.” He nods.

“How you holding up?” I ask.

“Peachy,” he says. “Just peachy. My partner blows his brains out, reporters and cops crawlin’ all over the office for a week, and this morning I get a call from this asshole in New York. He’s with the news, one of the networks. They’re callin’ for the deep scoop, you know, the novel approach. The national angle. Sure-shot nominee to the Supreme Court kills himself. What an asshole.” Skarpellos repeats the charge, this time with added conviction. “First question out of the box: ‘How do you feel about it all?’ I tell him, “Well, hell, except for the hair and little bits of gray shit all over the ceiling in the office, it wasn’t bad at all.’ Sonofabitch,” he says.

In the images of this crude narrative, my mind dwells on the thought that with Ben’s death the firm of Potter, Skarpellos has lost more than its driving force. It is without question missing a vast measure of style.

Skarpellos comes around to the front of my chair wringing his hands in typical southern European fashion. His high forehead is etched with deep furrows lost in a perpetual tan. He wears an expensive worsted pinstripe suit, artfully tailored to give the illusion of a trim torso. Skarpellos’s wardrobe is always meticulous, proportioned to maximize every inch of his five and a half feet of stature. Lifts in the heels of his shoes do the rest.

I wonder where he’s left his entourage, for Tony is seldom seen alone. Invariably he trails a wake of indentured subordinates, young lawyers on the move, whose sole mission with the firm, it seems, is the palpitation of the Greek’s ego. Fate shined on me, for Ben spared me this duty during my time with the firm.

Without asking, Skarpellos drops his body into the chair across from mine. Tony played Eliza to Potter’s Higgins through most of his career. The son of immigrants, he’s a proud man, and in his eyes at least, he has clawed his way to the top-on his own. He’s a natural glad-hander, more adept in the political arena than in a courtroom. It was, in fact, his abilities and influence with parochial governing boards, planning departments, and the myriad city councils in the area that from the beginning secured his place with the firm. Tony has the Midas touch when it comes to real estate. For the right fee he can produce zoning variances like the poor propagate children.

We pass a few pleasantries; it’s an awkward context for small talk. There are the obvious regrets, the universal human emotion following any suicide-some expressions of self-recrimination for what we might have done to prevent it. For his part, it soon becomes a litany of reminiscences-nostalgic tales of him and Ben as young men struggling in the jungle of a provincial and crude local judicial system to carve out civilization.

He stops in mid-sentence, looks at me as if some matter of high consequence has just crawled in from the subconscious.

“What the hell happened between the two of you, anyway? One day you’re there and the next you’re history.”

It is as I expected. Ben kept his own counsel in the matter of my affair with Talia. True to form, he was a man much possessed of appearances, and pride. In the eyes of his closest confidants, my departure from the firm continues to be viewed as the result of some falling-out over an obscure matter of business.

“It was between the two of us,” I say. “One of those things that happens sometimes between friends.”

“You make it sound like you were pokin’ his wife.” He laughs, turns, and snaps his fingers for a drink. For an instant I think that he’s been talking to an oracle. The waitress is on us before he can look back-before he can read the confession in my eyes. When he finally turns to face me again, his expression is a vacant smile. I breathe a little easier now, confident that Skarpellos, after all, has no special talent for clairvoyance.

“Let me buy ya a drink,” he says.

“Got two already.” I hold up a full glass.

He orders a double bourbon and returns to the subject of the firm and my leaving. I make a mental note to use a different line if asked the reasons for my departure from the firm in the future.

As it turns out, Cooper was right. Two days after our conversation at the Emerald Tower I was visited by the cops, a quiet FBI agent in tow. They asked me about my conversation with Potter at Wong’s. I bit my tongue and lied, a little white omission. I told them of his disclosure to me, the fact that he was destined for the court. I left out our heart-to-heart about Talia. They finally got to it. They wanted to know why I left the firm. Any disagreement, hard feelings between Potter and me? I denied it roundly and capped our conversation with Ben’s offer to have me serve as the trustee of the Sharon Cooper memorial fund. This was something they could check with the law school, a little corroboration. It lasted less than ten minutes. They seemed satisfied as they left.

“What the hell was it? You guys argue over a case or somethin’?” says Skarpellos.

“Something,” I say.

“You know, you should’ve come to me.”

“Why’s that?”

“I had a good amount of influence with Ben. He respected me.”

I say nothing but our eyes meet, and this time he reads my mind.

“No, it’s true. Ben did respect my judgment.”

I wonder what the Greek’s been smoking.

“We’d been together too long not to have developed a good degree of mutual respect,” he says.

I remove the smirk from my face, turn serious, but say nothing.

“There was no reason to lose talent like yours. I’ll bet I could’ve patched it up between the two of you.”

“Well,” I say. “One thing’s for sure.”