Compelling Evidence m-1 Page 8

  She’s right. I’d come to realize too late that a single psychic “attaboy” from Ben was worth any endless number of long hours locked in the mental drudgery of the fluorescent cave that was my office at P amp;S.

  For at least forty of his sixty years Potter was a human dynamo, the closest thing to perpetual energy this side of the sun. He worked seven days a week. In addition to his law practice and academic pursuits, he served on a dozen government and private panels. He was the penultimate blue-ribbon commissioner. Work was his life. It was his addiction.

  Perhaps it was because of this that Nikki never trusted him, nor for that matter liked him much. He had made particular efforts to be gracious in her company. But for some unstated reason she treated these gestures with the skepticism one might reserve for alchemy. I knew almost from the beginning mat my marriage and my continued association with Ben were relationships destined to produce friction-that one would ultimately devour the other. I suppose I also knew which was likely to fall victim, for I’d contracted the disease of my mentor. I’d become afflicted with a compulsive and purposeless need for work. That is what ended our marriage.

  “Your work was important to you,” she says. Nikki’s now making justifications for me.

  I leave it alone, let it stand, as a truism.

  “What about her?” asks Nikki.

  “Who?”

  “Ben’s wife-what’s her name-Tricia?”

  I pause for an instant, as if I have to search the dark recesses of my memory for the name of some fleeting acquaintance.

  “Talia,” I say.

  “That’s right, Talia. How’s Talia doing?”

  “I haven’t seen her. I don’t know. I suppose she’ll cope.”

  “Yes, I suppose,” says Nikki.

  I can’t believe we’re having this conversation.

  “What will happen with the firm now?” Nikki speaks while she mops the countertop.

  “I don’t know. I suppose it will go on.”

  “The papers are treating the whole thing with a lot of sensation, Ben’s death and all,” she says. “A lot of speculation.”

  “Newspapers always speculate. That’s their job,” I say.

  “It could be embarrassing for her.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Talia. The suicide, all the controversy, you know. It can’t be pleasant.”

  “I suppose.”

  “Has she offered to give you any help?”

  “What?”

  “Talia. Has she offered to help you get back in with the firm?”

  I am psychically coldcocked. But I do not stammer. I carry the farce to its conclusion, almost as a reflex. “What makes you think I want to go back to the firm? Why would she want to get involved?”

  Nikki turns from the sink and gives me a look, a “what am I, dogshit?” expression. She knows about Talia and me. It’s written in the smirk mat envelops her mouth. I am certain that wonder has crept across my face. It pains me that she may know only half the truth, that she may not know that Talia and I are no longer an item. But I can’t bring myself to say it. The careful shield of discretion that I had erected had been so transparent that Nikki has seen through it, and I am left to wonder, how many others? I stare back for several seconds. She blinks and breaks eye contact. She is bluffing-I think. A deft exercise in female intuition. But I take no chances. I avoid confrontation on the point.

  “It’s only natural mat there would be speculation and talk. It’s not every day that a nominee to the United States Supreme Court kills himself. Ben’s death leaves quite a hole in the firm,” I say.

  “Yes.” She pauses as if for effect. “That’s what I was talking about,” she says, “filling the hole.” The words are delivered with biting sarcasm.

  “Well, we’d better be hitting the road.” I have suddenly lost my desire for meaningful dialogue. “Come on, kiddo.” I scoop Sarah off her feet and balance her on my shoulder.

  “Be careful of her.”

  “What?” I turn to look at Nikki, waiting for some last-minute motherly admonition. She has dropped the sponge into the sink and now stands staring directly at me.

  “Watch yourself. She’s not to be trusted.”

  Her words strike like a thunderbolt when I realize that Nikki is talking not about our daughter, but about the woman, whom to my recollection she has met only twice in her life-Talia Potter.

  My Saturday-morning sojourns to the park with my daughter do double duty. As she scampers up the ladder and down the slide I do pull-ups on the monkey bars, and push-ups in the sand. It’s a cheap stand-in for my canceled membership at the athletic club, one of many luxuries now gone, the price of contributing to the support of two households. We move through the ritual, twenty minutes on the swings, five or six trips up and down the slide, and then it’s off to the ice cream parlor a dozen blocks away.

  I usher Sarah out of the playground and close the Cyclone gate to keep the other little inmates from escaping. As I turn, I see her.

  “Damn it.”

  Sarah’s wandered off the concrete and is up to her ankles in mud, an adventure spawned by a leaking sprinkler head.

  “Your mother’s gonna kill me.” I’m on her, but it’s too late. Her legs and lower torso are a thousand points of mud, courtesy of the hydraulics of two stamping little feet.

  “-I told you once, Madriani, a long time ago, a little more light, a little less heat. You’ll live longer.”

  It’s a voice from the past, lost in the tangle of a towering fern. I crane my neck. There, behind the plant, I see a ghost seated on a bench; he has a familiar smile, but the face is pale and drawn. Marginally recognizable, Sam Jennings, the man who hired me a dozen years ago to be a prosecutor in this county, looks up at me, a twinkle in his eye.

  He rises from the bench.

  “Good to see you again, Paul. Yours?” He nods toward Sarah.

  “Yes.”

  Her condition by now is hopeless. She has smeared the mud on her upper legs with her hands.

  “How old?” he asks.

  “Three.”

  “And a half,” Sarah chimes in, holding up three fingers.

  Jennings laughs. He stoops low to look her in the eyes. “I once had little girls just about your age.”

  Sarah is all round eyes. “What happened to them?”

  “They grew up.”

  I’ve missed this man greatly since leaving his fold and joining Potter, Skarpellos. I have on more than one occasion since my ouster from the firm considered calling him, but have thought better of delivering my problems to the doorstep of a sick man. When he called to ask me to attend Danley’s execution in his place, I knew how ill he really was. Sam isn’t the kind to ask people to do something he’s unwilling to do himself.

  His skin has the pallor of paraffin. Radiation and the ravages of chemistry have taken their toll. I tower over this man who was once my equal in physical stature. He is stooped and withered like straw following a rainstorm. A condition, I suspect, rendered not so much by the cancer that invades his body as by the clinical horrors that pass for a cure. It is, by all appearances, a losing battle.

  Our eyes follow Sarah, whose attention has been caught by a gray squirrel making for one of the trees. Her condition is hopeless. I let her go. I will simply have to absorb Nikki’s tongue-lashing later.

  Sam Jennings is, by nature, an affable man. His countenance has all the appearances of a face well stamped from birth with an abiding smile. But there are those who learned too late that this is an aspect of his character that belies an acquired predatory sense. For in his thirty years as chief prosecutor for this county and in the early decades of his tenure, Samuel Jennings, for crimes well deserved, sent a half-dozen men to their final peace in the state’s gas chamber.

  “See any of the old crowd?” I ask.

  “I suppose that’s one of the benefits of leaving voluntarily instead of getting your ass kicked in an election. You can stop by the office every once i
n a while. Even so,” he says, “Nelson doesn’t exactly roll out the red carpet.”

  “What’s the problem?”

  “Who knows. Maybe he thinks my being there is going to crimp his management style. Hell, look at me. What’s he think, I’m gonna run against him?”

  “Maybe he thinks you might plant the idea elsewhere,” I say. “Maybe with one of his deputies.”

  “Who, me?” he says. There’s a lot of feigned innocence here. I can tell that this scenario is not original with me, unless I’ve misread the twinkle in his eye. He’s probably been solicited for an endorsement. I wonder who in the office it is, who will be fingered to step out on the ledge with Nelson on election day, to try to nudge him off. Nelson was appointed to fill the vacancy left when Sam retired. Now he has to earn his spurs in the next election.

  “How’s it going with you? The solo practice and all?”

  I make a face. “Enjoying it enough. Now ask me if I’m making any money.”

  “Money’s not everything.” He smiles.

  “This from a man with a fat county pension.”

  “You could’ve stayed there. Didn’t have to go chasing the rainbow,” he says.

  “Hmm. Not a very happy place right now. Not from what I hear.”

  “Maybe a little more political than when I was there.”

  “Now who’s minimizing things?” I say.

  He laughs. “No worse than some firms I could mention.”

  There’s an instant of uncomfortable silence as he eyes me, looking for some sign, a hint of willingness to talk, some revelation as to the causes for my departure from the firm. He comes up empty.

  “One of life’s true tragedies,” says Jennings. “Ben Potter. Guy had a veritable flair for success. Would’ve put this town on the national map, his appointment to the court.”

  “I suppose.” National life goes on. The papers had it that morning. The President had made another nomination to the court. The administration’s playing it coy, refusing to confirm that it had ever offered the position to Ben.

  I try to kill the subject with silence. Jennings has never blessed my move to the firm. Like Plato, he defines ultimate justice as each man’s finding his proper niche in life. And from the beginning, he never believed that I would fit in with Potter, Skarpellos.

  “It’s hard to figure,” he says.

  “What’s that?”

  “Why anybody would want to kill him.”

  I look at Sam Jennings, this paragon of sober intelligence, in stony silence. I know his words are not the product of some wit that has missed its mark.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “People in Nelson’s shop tell me they’re getting vibes, something strange about the whole thing from the cops. Not the usual stuff following a suicide.”

  “Like what?”

  “Seems Potter’s office and an elevator down the hall have been taped off for more than a week now. Forensics has been camped there.”

  “Probably just being careful,” I say. “The feds are involved.”

  “You think that’s it, a little bureaucratic rivalry?”

  I make a face, like “Who knows?”

  “I don’t think so,” he says. Jennings has a shit-eating grin. The kind that says he has inside information.

  “The service elevator on Potter’s floor.” He looks at me to make sure I’m following his drift. “It’s been sealed by the cops and out of commission for almost a week. The janitors and delivery people are raising hell, I’m told. I think the cops are reading more than tea leaves or the entrails of a goat.”

  I make another face. I’m waiting for the punch line. It wouldn’t be the first time Capitol City’s finest have wasted taxpayers’ dollars shadow-boxing with illusions.

  “If Potter killed himself in his office, I can understand combing his desk, vacuuming his carpet. But why the elevator?”

  I give him my best you-tell-me expression.

  “Conventional wisdom has it,” he says, “he didn’t.”

  “Didn’t what?”

  “Didn’t die in the office.”

  “That’s where they found the body.” I bite my tongue, on the verge of disclosing part of my conversation with George Cooper outside of the Emerald Tower that night.

  “Word is,” he says, “cops found traces of blood and hair in that service elevator. It appears that if he shot himself, somebody took the time to move the body after the event.”

  “Where did you hear this?”

  “Not from Duane Nelson,” he says. His smile is all teeth. Jennings is not revealing his source. Clearly this is a matter of someone’s survival. Leaks from a prosecutor’s office in a case like this are sure career killers.

  CHAPTER 9

  To find George Cooper on this Monday morning I have to crawl like a mole under the dismal seven-story county jail. Built to house a thousand trusties and inmates, it now overflows with 2,500, the best of whom are furloughed during the day on work-release programs and pressed like dehydrated fruit back into overcrowded cells at night. The metal monolith is a monument to the bankruptcy of modern government. The building’s facade presents the incongruous appearance of cheerful orange metal panels more appropriate to a day-care center. The roof is enclosed behind Cyclone fencing topped by razor-sharp rolls of concertina wire, sealing off the sky-high exercise yard and preventing possible escape.

  Given the office’s low status on the law enforcement pecking order, it’s the best the county coroner can do. Stiffs don’t rate high as a voting constituency with the county supes at budget time. So in a cavern originally designed for parking under the jail, Cooper and his seven companions toil beneath the ground in the blistering heat of summer and through the dank oppression of winter’s tule fog.

  He sits staring at me. Fluids of unknown human origin streak his neoprene apron, for by nine in the morning he’s been hard at it for more than an hour. Genuine concern registers in his eyes, for George Cooper doesn’t like to say no to a friend.

  “I’d like to help you out, Paul. I think you know that. But on this thing Nelson’s got the lid on-tight as a drum.” George Cooper speaks with a slow Southern drawl, the kind that pulls every vowel in the alphabet over his tongue like cold syrup.

  By all accounts, George Saroyan Cooper, “Coop” to anyone who has known him for more than a week, is a handsome man. A shock of coal-black hair parted neatly on the left, tempered with specks of gray at the temples, outlines the fine features of his face-a gentle well-proportioned nose slightly upturned at the tip, deep-set brown eyes, and thin lips curled in a chronic grin convey the good nature of the man. His teeth are pearl-white and evenly spaced, set off by a rich and carefully groomed black mustache, itself peppered with faint wisps of gray where it joins laugh lines at the corners of his mouth.

  He’s carrying several glass slides in his hand and slips one of them under a stereoscope on the table next to the counter. “I’ve told ’em to bag the hands,” he says. “Always bag the hands.”

  I smile at him, oblivious to his latest frustration.

  “N-o-o-o-o,” he says. “They roll the cadavers into this place with the hands hanging free, out off the side of the gurney, like the guy’s gotta scratch an itch or somethin’.” He squints into the microscope. He’s talking to himself now, his back to me.

  Coop hails from South Carolina, an old Charleston family, of which he’s the black sheep. It wasn’t that Cooper failed to live up to his parents’ expectations. His father and grandfather had been physicians before him. But they tended to the living.

  I’ve known George Cooper for seven years. It seems like longer. He possesses the easy nature of the South, a slow, genteel charm. I would guess that if you asked twelve people who knew him to identify their best friend, each in his own turn would name George Cooper. He has worked his magic on me as well, for if asked, I would make it a baker’s dozen.

  And yet behind all of the warmth, the hardy good nature, there is the shadow of some b
aleful quality that sets Coop apart from others in my circle of friendship. The casual acquaintance might credit this ominous phantom to Coop’s occupation, and in a way that would be right. But it’s not the morbid nature of his work that accounts for this schism of demeanor. It’s grounded in the fact that Coop is driven to pursue the pathology of death with a missionary’s zeal. The dead speak to George Cooper. He’s their interpreter, the translator of organic missives from beyond the grave. And to George Cooper, it’s a holy calling.

  I lobby him, cajole him for information about Potter’s death. He listens. Like a banker hit for a loan, taciturn. He turns from the microscope, rests his buttocks against the edge of an empty gurney pressed against the wall.

  “How’s your little girl?” he asks.

  Dealing with Coop can be frustrating.

  “She’s fine.”

  “I remember Sharon at that age,” he says. “She loved the job, you know. I guess I never thanked you.”

  I shake my head but say nothing. In the pit of my stomach I feel a knot beginning to grow. With Ben’s death I wonder what will happen to the law school’s largess, “The Sharon Cooper Trust.” No doubt it will now be dwarfed by another in the name of “Benjamin G. Potter.”

  “She would have been a good lawyer,” I say.

  He nods. There’s a glaze of water over his eyes. He wipes them with his sleeve. I don’t tell about the limited progress I’ve made on Sharon’s probate. I’ve struck out with Feinberg. After listening to his spiel at the University Club, I approached him cautiously and told him my tale of woe. He declined to take the case-“Too busy,” he said. So I’m back to square one. But it’s my one consolation with Coop: He doesn’t press. Patience is a Southern virtue.

  “I’m lookin’ for other leads,” he says, “in Sharon’s death.”

  The accident remains an open matter with the police. Sharon’s car had been involved in a single-vehicle accident, careening off the road into a tree. But evidence at the scene revealed that she had not been driving at the time. Coop is on his own quest to find the driver.