Rough Justice Read online

  “Stabus, fabus,” I remarked.

  But I kept getting shaken. I kept getting sick. And the screaming made that lightning bolt of pain flash and flash again.

  I became aware that someone had stepped in dogshit and then scraped his shoe on my tongue.

  “Damn it, Wells, wake up! You can’t do this. You can’t do this now, wake up!”

  I stretched my forehead until my eyes were torn open. There was a blur. A bright blur, too bright. It sort of shivered around this way and that, and I could make out glints and colors, shifting in it, like in a kaleidoscope. And there were images in there, images of people, many people, who all looked exactly alike, who all went spinning around a white center. Then, for a moment, all the pictures, all the people, congealed into one.

  Why, I thought, there’s Lansing. And she’s yelling right into my face.

  “Damn you, damn you, damn you!” she yelled.

  I peered at her stupidly. She looked very beautiful. That delicate porcelain oval of a face, framed with blond hair. Her high cheeks with the faint blush on them. Her blue eyes with their wide black centers. Those rich red lips. It seemed a shame to throw up on her.

  I swung my arm wildly. It knocked her back out of the way. I tilted out of my easy chair, pitched forward onto my hands and knees, and vomited onto the floor. Then I collapsed headfirst into the vomit. I could feel it damp and pebbly on my cheek. I could smell it. I wanted to move. But I was so tired. So tired …

  Then I was in the chair again, the tatty yellow easy chair in my bedroom. I felt something cool and damp on my forehead. I rolled my head toward it. Opened my eyes.

  Why, there’s Lansing again, I thought. What a coincidence.

  She had pulled the ottoman up next to me. She sat on it, reaching over the chair arm to swab me with a wet cloth. She blurred again and went double as I looked at her. It was becoming a bad habit of hers.

  Now, the room around her was tilting and swaying too. I closed my eyes to stop it. It stopped. My stomach tilted and swayed instead. I opened my eyes. I stared hard until the various images of Lansing put themselves back together into one. The one image was crying.

  I reached up weakly, caught hold of her wrist. I held it close to my cheek. Lansing raised her free hand to her face, bowed into it, and cried.

  “I didn’t mean to kill him, Lance,” I said.

  She nodded into her palm. “I know that. Don’t you think I know that? Everyone does.”

  “Watts …”

  “Forget Watts. To hell with Watts.”

  “It was just so … bad,” I said. “… when he died. Choking. Just a kid, Lancer.”

  She wiped her cheeks with her hand. She raised her eyes to me. “Don’t do this.”

  “I couldn’t help him. I wanted to. I wanted to.” I looked away from her. And I saw the boy on the floor. Thrashing on the floor, grabbing at his throat. Making that sound, that quiet, breath-empty sound, in the quiet apartment. Probably what Olivia looked like, what my daughter looked like, sounded like when she hanged herself. I closed my eyes at the thought, but it didn’t help. I could still see the image clearly.

  I opened my eyes. There was Lansing. Her arm outstretched, letting me press her cool hand to my skin. Still, crying slightly, her lips parted.

  “Stop looking at me like that, Lansing,” I said.

  She snuffled. She shook her head. She whispered: “I can’t. I can’t stop. I never could. I wish I could. But I can’t.”

  So I let her do it another moment. I even looked back awhile. I was beginning to feel sick again. My shirt felt damp and the smell of vomit was like a cloud all around me. The pain in my head was now a steady, rhythmic screek: a cat clawing at the windowpane, trying to get out.

  I forced myself to let go of Lansing’s hand. I forced myself to push out of the chair. I stood up, and stumbled to one side. Lansing jumped to her feet and caught me by the arm.

  “I’m all righ’ … All righ’ …” I muttered.

  I pulled away from her. Crying, she let my arm slide through her hands as I lumbered toward the bathroom. I peeled my shirt off as I went. I dropped it on the floor behind me.

  In the can, I pissed and then hovered over the toilet awhile. I thought I might puke again. When I didn’t, I moved to the sink. Started the water running. I cupped some in my hands and splashed it up over me. I lifted my gaze to the medicine-chest mirror.

  The thing that stared out of the glass looked something like me, only decomposed. The crags in the thin cheeks seemed to have fallen in on themselves. Gray stubble covered the long chin. The flesh on the high forehead was gray, too, and so was the widow’s peak which dangled limp and damp above it.

  I turned away. Stripped the rest of my clothes off and stepped into the shower. I turned the water on hard. It pulsed out of the nozzle, steaming.

  I stood under the steady blast, my head bent, the water pounding me. Fragments of two lost days flashed at me from far away, like glass shards in the gutter. Mostly it was the bars. Cocktail dives way downtown. Places where I wasn’t known. Mostly, I caught flashes of the bars and my hand wrapped around a Scotch glass, the smoke of a cigarette stripping my throat, burning my nose.

  But there was more. There were other flashes, after a while, as I stood there under the hot spray. There were the papers Friday. The heads on the tabloids. The metro lead in the Times. I remembered haunting the newsstands, waiting for them Thursday night. Carrying them back to the bars. Poring over them, my hand gripping the glass.

  Those headlines—they were hard to take. But the stories weren’t as bad as I thought they’d be. Only the Post came after me: REPORTER KILLS YALE MAN. With Matt Flamm pegging me the “Star’s so-called ace metropolitan reporter.” So-called by him. But then, he owed me one for stealing his car that time.

  The Star went easy, Wilkinson or no. And the News put Bronco Nagourney on it, an old friend. Both of them played up the mystery angle, the investigation still continuing, that stuff. Newsday did the same and front-paged the Libyans anyway. The Times did its usual just-the-facts routine, no jump page. Probably took them a while to find New York City on the map.

  The TV wasn’t so tough, either, once Molly went home for the day. No one wanted to crucify one of their own, if they could help it. Like the papers, they were poised, waiting for the scent of blood. If Watts got an indictment, they’d be on me like sharks on a wounded shark. I’d have done the same. No big deal.

  But there were still the pictures. The pictures of Thad Reich, staring out at me, eager-eyed. A smart kid, working for the homeless. Good son, good husband, good citizen. And the picture of me—my I. D. photo—fuzzy and ragged and worn. Blood on his hands. Even I didn’t like him.

  And there was still that voice:

  A man is dead. You killed him. Someone has to pay.

  Only the booze could quiet that voice. So I drank. And that’s all I remembered.

  Now, I got out of the shower. Dried myself off, wrapped the towel around my middle. I brushed my teeth, rinsed, spat chunks of vomit into the sink. I started to shave—and cut a thick strip of flesh off just under the jawline. The plastic razor clattered in the sink as it fell from my trembling hand.

  I braced my hands on the sink’s edges. I bowed my head. My blood dripped down onto the white porcelain. It mingled with the droplets of water there, turning from red to pink. I stood and watched lines of it run down to the drain. I bit down hard on my lip.

  Then, after a moment, I whispered: “Christ!”

  “Wells.” It was Lansing. She was just outside the door. “Wells, are you all right? We’ve got to talk.”

  I nodded. I couldn’t answer.

  “Wells?” she said.

  “All right. I’m all right. I’ll be right out.”

  There was a pause. “I’ll … I’ll make some coffee while you get dressed. Okay?” Another pause. “Wells?”

  “I’ll be right there, kid.”

  I heard her moving away. I looked up at the door, waited until
I was sure she’d gone.

  “I didn’t mean to kill him, Lance,” I said again.

  I cleaned the blood from my jaw and pushed out of the bathroom. A tart mist of disinfectant floated in the bedroom air. Lansing had put the place to rights, more or less. Swiped up the vomit. Made the bed. She’d even laid a shirt and a pair of slacks out on the quilt for me. I shuffled over to them like an old man. I began the long, complex chore of stuffing myself into them.

  The smell was better in the other room by the time I stumbled into it. Lansing was frying eggs in a panful of spattering butter. The pot on the coffeemaker was filled. The broiler door was open and I could see toast cooking on the middle rack.

  I wandered to the kitchenette counter, leaned on it. Glanced over my shoulder at the floor. Lansing had taken up the police tape, the outline of Thad Reich. I turned to her, tried to say something.

  She didn’t listen. She dashed some coffee in a mug with the swift accuracy of a former counter-girl. Banged the mug down on the counter in front of me. Turned back to the stove. I leaned into the steam of it. My stomach did a barrel roll. I braved the nausea, and took a sip. Slowly, my guts eased in for a landing. The balloon between my ears began to deflate a little.

  “Oh man,” I said.

  “Some drunk,” said Lansing.

  “The drunk was fine. The hangover stinks.”

  “You’re lucky I got to you.”

  “Yeah, what are friends for if they can’t shake you till you throw up?”

  “It was for your own good. I’ve been trying to find you for days. I’ve been trying to wake you up for hours.”

  “Maybe I didn’t want to be found. Maybe I didn’t want to wake up.”

  “Too bad. I had to get the super to let me in.” She spun around, slapped one of my best plastic dishes onto the counter. The eggs on it gawked at me. Lansing slid two slices of white toast next to them.

  She handed me a fork. “Eat the eggs.”

  “I don’t want any eggs.”

  “Eat the eggs or I will kill you, Wells.”

  “Yeah? How will I know I’m dead?”

  “The pain will stop. Eat the eggs.”

  I clipped a wedge of white from a corner and put it on my tongue. It sat there. I drank some coffee, washed it down to my stomach. It sat there. I groaned. Tried it again.

  Lansing leaned on the counter opposite me. Her blue eyes bore into me as I tipped the mug back, gasped out of it, set it down.

  “Now, listen to me,” she said. “You’ve got to stop torturing yourself.”

  “And change my whole way of life?”

  “I’m serious. You haven’t got the time for it. The cops are off the record saying it’s beginning to look like murder. Gottlieb says Watts is onto something, he doesn’t know what. He says it won’t take much to force the D.A.’s hand. Once there’s an indictment …”

  “I know.”

  “It’s catch-up ball.”

  “I said I know.”

  “You don’t act like you know.”

  “Well, I know, all right?”

  “Good,” she said. “Because your self-pity is just meat for that bastard. Eat your eggs.”

  I toyed with my eggs some more while Lansing poured more coffee. I sawed off a bigger hunk this time and managed to swallow it without too much effort. Then I tossed the fork to the plate. I pinched the bridge of my nose, closed my eyes.

  “Well, that’s no good,” said Lansing.

  “It works for me,” I said.

  It was a second or two before I could look up again. When I did, I turned away from her, toward the window above my desk. Outside, the spring weather had turned sour. The sky over Eighty-sixth Street was gray. The window pane was streaked with a thin, steady rain. Judging by the light, it seemed to be midmorning.

  “Okay. Give me the rest of this.”

  “It’s bad, rotten. We’re all for you on the floor, but the People Upstairs have more or less written you off. I don’t know which of their emotions is involved—greed or fear—but every day they don’t clear your name—every day they don’t build a statue to you in Central Park—Bush comes closer to suspending you. The commissioner’s on him and the cops are backing him. They don’t much like Watts, but they don’t want him tried in the media.”

  “Why not? We’re a hell of a lot faster than Internal Affairs.”

  She smiled with one corner of her mouth. Straightened and turned to the cupboard for another mug. I turned from the window to watch her. She was wearing a yellow turtleneck sweater and tight light blue jeans. It was good to see her move in them. She talked without facing me.

  “To her credit, Miss Dog Food of Madison Avenue has been standing up for you. So they tell me, anyway. The word is she’s practically used up her honeymoon period fighting the suspension. In that perky way of hers that’s apparently so endearing.”

  She slapped some coffee into a mug for herself, and another dose for me. She looked up and caught me studying her. She smiled again, then leaned back against the oven, hiding the smile behind her mug.

  “At least you’re still alive,” she said.

  “Yeah, I have it all over Thad Reich in that department.”

  She clunked the mug down on the stove behind her. “All right. That’s enough,” she said. “That’s plenty. I don’t know why, but that Ivy League punk tried to off you, darling. You want to sit around here and drink, or you want to find out what’s going on?”

  “I want to sit around here and drink. Damn it!” I slapped the counter with an open hand. The coffee sloshed out of my mug. The fork clattered on the plate. “I can’t believe they won’t run the Watts piece. I had him. I had that bastard dead to rights.” I clenched my fist. “That gets me. That’s what gets me. Him after me. Christ!”

  “Well, that’s how it is. You want to live with it or not?”

  “I want to sit around and drink. I thought we covered that.”

  But Lansing was moving now. Striding out of the kitchenette into the living room. I watched her as she stepped right across the spot where young Thad had choked to death. She went to the desk by the window. Snatched her purse from the desktop. Snapped it open and yanked out one of her notebooks.

  She flipped the thin book open as she paced out to the center of the room.

  “Here’s what there is so far,” she said. “First of all, Thad Reich … Did you get this from the papers?”

  “Probably, but let’s do it sober.”

  “A Yale man.”

  “That I remember.”

  “From Somerville, Mass. Father a district sales head for National Foods. Mother a housewife and part-time nurse with two daughters.” She glanced up at me. “They’re decent people, it seems like. Racked up—well, the way you’d figure. You know, they’re not too sophisticated. They don’t seem … They can’t understand …”

  “Why the man who killed their son hasn’t been busted for murder.”

  She looked at her notes again. “They won’t talk to us, anyway. And now they’re pretty much shut off from everyone, in mourning, all that. They gave a couple of interviews right at the start. Nothing much.”

  “Yeah, I saw one Molly Caldwell used.”

  “That bitch. She’s in my book for this. I talked to Wallace in TV. Wait’ll next year. Where was I?” The flush faded from her cheeks as she surveyed the page, lifted it, surveyed another.

  I spotted a cigarette pack on the other side of the counter. Snagged one, poked it between my lips.

  “Okay,” Lansing said. “So he’s a smart kid, apple of his mother’s eye, no enemies, la la la … Okay. Goes to Yale. MBA. Out he comes and he heads to Wall Street. Did you finish the eggs?”

  I cupped my hands around a match as it flared. “I thought he was Mr. Charity Worker. Where’s Wall Street come in?”

  She sighed. “Well, that’s the thing. Two years ago, Reich comes to town, following what seems to be his destiny. In six months, he’s one of the hot Young Turks at Bennett-Dreiser. In a y
ear, he’s washing the sores of lepers.”

  “Did they bury him?”

  “What?”

  “Reich. Did they have his funeral?”

  “Yeah. Up in Massachusetts. Are you listening to me?”

  “I was just wondering.” I held the cigarette to my mouth with a trembling hand. “All right, so first he’s a money man, then he’s a saint. What happened?”

  Lansing lifted a hand, let it fall to her hip. “A spokesman for B-D said something like, ‘Thad was not cut out for the fast-paced life of today’s financial market.’”

  “He said that?”

  “I know. It sounds so much like bullshit, but I can’t find any dirt.”

  “SEC? Ciccelli?”

  “Nothing. He didn’t have time to get in trouble. He came, he saw, he fled.”

  “What’s his wife say?”

  “She won’t talk. She was up in Mass. for the funeral, then came straight back. No comment anywhere.”

  “So he turns his back on a life of wealth to help the homeless, and he’s clean. I’m fucked.”

  “Well, wait.” Lansing flipped over a notebook page, scanned the book eagerly. She took two steps to the right, two to the left, two to the right again. I watched her, the shape of her moving in the sweater, in the jeans. I thought about her cleaning up the mess in the bedroom. “Okay,” she said. “Celia Cooper.”

  “The woman who ran the shelter. Watts mentioned her. She loved Reich. ‘What a loss.’”

  “Right. And she goes along with the Bennett-Dreiser guy. She says basically Reich found the Wall Street life empty and—‘spiritually unsatisfying,’ she said—and started working for her to try to make sense of things.”

  “I killed Gandhi.”

  She stopped pacing, one leg out, one hip jutting. “Look. I figure there are two possibilities. One is that Reich was robbing your apartment and you surprised him. Now, given the facts that you have nothing and he wanted nothing, that seems pretty unlikely.”

  “What’s the other possibility?”

  “That there’s some connection between you two.”

  “I never heard of him.”

  “No.” She took a long stride until she stood beside me. I could smell her scent again. It did not make me sick anymore. “But you have heard of Cooper. The shelter she runs is the Cooper House.”