A Welcome Haunting - Part Twenty-Six
SUNDAY LATE NIGHT TO MONDAY MORNING
The post-beating pain killers were supposed to last ten days. I started taking them Friday morning and by Sunday afternoon they were gone. I drank a lot at each of the three birthday parties I accompanied my daughter to that weekend and had wine with every dinner. By sundown Sunday I was a scraped out mess. I couldn’t walk in a straight line and started missing corners in my apartment, slamming my shoulder into door frames.
After the kids were asleep and my wife put away her work and crawled into bed I opened a bottle of beer and drank it down in front of the refrigerator. I took a shower and got dressed. Jeans with a wrinkled white button down long taken out of professional rotation, old Stan Smith sneakers and a brown leather jacket. And again the baseball cap. I grabbed my wallet, phone and keys and took the elevator down to the lobby where I put on a more sober face for the doorman. I grabbed a cab already on the Manhattan Bridge on-ramp.
Five hours later I was sitting on the sidewalk, leaning against the wall of one of my regular downtown bars, sharing a smoke with my grandfather and arguing over the nature of personal and political betrayal. The manager of the bar was worried about me and my early week early hours imbibing. I told him I was fine and had company, which produced a puzzled look at the empty stools around me. That’s when my grandfather and I took the fight outside.
He encouraged patience and understanding. I paraphrased Pink Floyd.
“When I was a child, I also had a fleeting glimpse. But what I saw out of the corner of my eye was violence and language and war as tools for things much bigger than I could understand then. I’ve caught up but it’s been painful,” I shared, implicating him and others.
“You did this to yourself,” he corrected me. “You could have looked at something else, noticed other things.”
“Not a chance,” I slapped back, implicating myself. “That was never a possibility.”
I stood up too quickly and slid back down the graffiti covered red brick. The old man motioned for me to sit a while longer to clear my head.
The next few hours were a blur but I did wind up at French Roast on Sixth Avenue and West Eleventh Street, where I sat for over two hours with pancakes and eggs and bacon and coffee. Breakfasting while the sky lightens in the West Village is a treat that I had missed out on for too long.
After I was together enough to splash water on my face and freshen up with a trip to an always open CVS, I called a Black Car back into Brooklyn. I intended to go home but instead told the driver to take me to Ditmas Park. The Judge’s wife found me sitting on the steps of her front porch when she came out to pick up the delivered morning newspapers. She brought me into the kitchen, handed me a mug of coffee and then left me in the living room with a careful kiss on the cheek.
Ten minutes later her husband appeared, wearing a dark charcoal gray suit with a broad white pinstripe, a pink shirt and black and white polka-dot tie.
“You shouldn’t be here.”
“Nope, but here I am.” I crossed my right leg and rested the mug on my knee. “I figured this wasn’t a conversation for an office or restaurant. And I guessed you wouldn’t take my call or agree to see me, so I just came by.”
“You look truly and disturbingly awful.”
“I know. Tomorrow I’ll leave for ten days away, detox some and rest. I swear I am very close to completely cracking up.”
The Judge looked pained. While I didn’t doubt his affection for me, I now knew how disposable I was. I would have been missed and he would have felt awful about it but he would have had me killed.
“I was keeping it together pretty well, even through figuring out about the autopsy,” I went on. “Even during the beating I took. But it was who got the D.A. initially looking into the Rabbi that really hurt.”
“Why should that one part of this sordid affair be the thing to set you off?” my benefactor asked with no small amount of self-loathing.
“I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised. It makes sense that you would have instigated an investigation that had the potential to ruin you. The more I thought about it over the weekend, it struck me as obvious.”
“I don’t know about obvious. I didn’t see it that way when I started those conversations.”
“There really was only one way for that to play out and you read it totally correct. To me it’s obvious. To Jackie it’s obvious. We three kings stopped it there.”
The Judge smiled wanly, relieved.
“There was no way the Rabbi wasn’t going to talk,” I went on, “and you knew that he would offer up what he thought was a big item. He would have given them you. He never thought about what was behind your asking him to call the Senator. He probably figured it was for a friend’s kid or an important former client or some other harmless corruption.”
The Judge agreed. “He had no idea about the kind of people lined up behind me, propping me up, pushing me forward. You’re right, I knew he would talk.”
“You started all this once you got word that the Governor was considering you for the Court of Appeals. You started this to get free of him.”
“Yes. It would be fair to say, in the final analysis, that I killed him,” the Judge confessed.
Since I had finished my coffee I brought the mug into the kitchen, washed it and left it in the rack next to the sink. When I came back into the living room the Judge was leaning against the wall next to a window he had opened. He had gone through my jacket looking for a cigarette, which he was now smoking. He blew smoke out the window and handed me the cigarette while motioning for me to keep the smoke out of the house. We stood across from each other on either side of the window.
“It was risky, yes, but once I was on the short list for the nomination I banked on being able to quietly withdraw and leave the bench if things went in a direction I couldn’t manage. Bad with the D.A., bad with Jackie, bad with the enemies I’ve made in Albany over the years.”
“What would you have done if you needed to resign?” I handed the cigarette back to him to finish and sat down on the couch. He smoked quietly and didn’t answer me. He didn’t not hear the question. He was just spending a moment thinking about what could have happened.
The Judge took a deep breath and started to talk without turning to me or moving from his spot on the wall next to the window.
“You’re taking the position I had negotiated for myself with the firm in Charleston. Assuming I didn’t die in a car accident or in a not-so-random random mugging, that was the plan.”
“We are surrounded by menace,” I said. The Judge shrugged. “How hair trigger is that, now that we’re through this rough patch?”
“Not at all, it’s done,” he said reassuringly as he sat down next to me, no longer a confessing and worried co-conspirator. “Probably this is a new start of things. There are judicial spots beyond this one.”
I started nodding off on the couch. The Judge’s wife steered me upstairs and settled me in their daughter’s old room, which was still made up from when she had stayed the week before while grieving over the loss of her unborn child.
I slept eight hours.