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  Mean Streak

  A Cass Jameson Mystery

  Carolyn Wheat

  For Margaret and Malice IV

  With friends all things are possible

  CHAPTER ONE

  “You know when it’s over?” I didn’t wait for an answer, just said the words that occurred to me as I scanned the Daily News. “When you stop looking for his horoscope in the morning paper.”

  “Riordan, you mean,” Dorinda interpreted. She lifted the plastic cover from a tray of pastries and squeezed a doughnut to test its freshness. It was fifteen minutes before the Morning Glory Luncheonette was due to open its doors to the public. I sat in my privileged seat by the window sipping my first cup of the day.

  “Those okay?” I tipped my head toward the pastries.

  “They’ll do. Maybe the crullers are a little hard, though.” She gave me an amused look. “Want to test one?”

  I shrugged assent. The cruller, homemade in a bakery over on Henry Street, was spun of sugar, flour, and air. Even a day old, they melted in the mouth. “They’ll do,” I agreed.

  “I never had much faith in you and Riordan,” Dorinda said. She walked to the back, toward the kitchen, and returned with a rack of newly washed juice glasses. She set the rack on the counter and emptied it as we talked, the clink of glass punctuating our conversation, while the early morning sun lit the sky behind the Court Street storefronts.

  “What makes you say that?” I had my own reasons for thinking Dorinda was right, but like any good cross-examiner, I wanted the witness’s own version.

  “You said it yourself, Cass,” she replied with a smug little smile. She poured herself a glass of orange juice, took a quick sip, and explained. “The horoscope. You’re Sagittarius and he’s Scorpio. It was bound to fail.”

  “Sagittarius and Scorpio,” I muttered, gazing into the depths of my coffee as though looking for something. “I should have known.”

  “You should have,” Dorinda agreed, unaware we were on different wavelengths. “The Scorpion has a way of lashing out with his poisoned stinger,” she said, her blue eyes intense. “And of course the arrows of truth aimed by Sagittarius can—”

  “Can annoy the hell out of a saint,” I finished. I’d heard this one before. “And as we both know, Matt Riordan is no saint.”

  “Have you read it yet?” Dorinda asked, carefully polishing one of her vintage juice glasses. This one was printed with gaily colored oranges that diminished in size as they reached the narrow bottom.

  The question was not the non sequitur it sounded at first hearing; my ex’s picture graced the cover of this week’s New York magazine.

  “It’s in my briefcase,” I mumbled. “I’ll read it in court while I wait for the court officers to produce my client.” The truth was, I was afraid to open the glossy cover, afraid to learn things about Matt Riordan I didn’t want to know.

  “Besides,” Dorinda went on, bringing the discussion back to the personal, “he was too”—she broke off and gave an awkward shrug—“too driven, too involved in his career, too—” Another pause. “I never thought he wanted a relationship, just somebody to ball when he needed a—”

  “Ball,” I repeated. “I haven’t heard that expression in a long time. I never really understood it; I mean it isn’t the balls that do the—”

  “And you aren’t much better,” my old friend went on, disregarding my excursion into anatomy. “If you had to choose between your main squeeze and your career, the guy’d be gone so fast his head would spin.”

  “Which made my relationship with Riordan perfect for both of us,” I pointed out. “We were both driven, both ambitious, both selfish, each of us using the other for sexual release. We were made for each other.”

  Dorinda began shaking her head somewhere in the middle of my recitation. “You knew from the beginning it wouldn’t last,” she said. “In fact, I would have sworn you were getting ready to dump him.”

  I swallowed a hit of coffee and let the dark roast linger in my mouth. Then I spoke the truth that branded me a totally shallow, ego-driven woman: “That’s not the same as him dumping me.”

  I looked down at the Formica counter. “For a lemon-haired lady,” I added under my breath.

  “Whatever happened to Dory Previn, anyway?” Dorinda asked.

  This was a non sequitur. “What are you talking about?”

  “That’s her song. ‘Lemon-haired ladies.’ I just wondered what—”

  “God, I don’t know. I forgot that was hers.” I stopped a minute as the irony struck me; if the song was Dory Previn’s, then the original lemon-haired lady was Mia Farrow. What goes around, and all that. Which meant that somewhere along the line I was getting what I deserved for all the times I’d been the dumper instead of the dumpee. Not to mention those times when I’d been the Younger Woman. Times now far in the past; for me to qualify as a Younger Woman these days, the guy would have to be collecting Social Security.

  “Not that Taylor’s hair is really lemon-yellow,” I mused aloud. “More an ash-blond. Cut like Hillary’s.”

  “She’s younger than you, isn’t she?”

  “Younger, slimmer, blonder, better dressed—you name it, Taylor has it. Including the name Taylor. She’s like someone on a nighttime soap opera. She even has a soap opera job; she designs interiors.”

  I swallowed the last of the coffee and stood up. I squared my shoulders and prepared to do battle in the only interior I knew anything about—the interior of the Kings County supreme court.

  It was pushing eighty degrees, and the sun wasn’t even over the three-story brownstones yet. It was going to be another scorcher. I wore a silk camp shirt and a cotton skirt and had my all-purpose linen jacket slung over my arm. I’d need it in the arctic air of the supreme court building.

  Riordan and I had never promised each other fidelity. The thought hit me as I stood waiting for the light to change so I could cross Atlantic Avenue, home of Arab spice stores and warehouses filled with antique furniture. Also the home of the Brooklyn House of Detention, another building whose interior I was all too familiar with.

  We had never promised anything.

  Then why did it hurt so much?

  I want my secrets back. The thought came unbidden as I strode along the steamy street. I wanted my secrets back. I wanted to unsay things I’d said as we’d lain in bed on delicious Sunday mornings when neither of us had a trial to prepare for.

  That was the worst part about breaking up with someone. You’d told them things you’d never told anyone else. And now he wasn’t your confidant anymore; he was a stranger, and he knew things you no longer wanted him to know.

  In Brooklyn, the supreme court is decorated in blond wood, very fifties, with the added touch of carved slogans behind the judge’s bench. The one in Part 57 said “Let Justice Be Done Though The Heavens Fall.” It’s shorter and pithier in Latin: fiat justitia, ruat coelum.

  I tossed my files on the defense table. It was 12:30; I’d hit every courtroom on my schedule and if I could finish this case before the lunch break, I’d have the afternoon to catch up on office work.

  I looked up at the slogan on the wall and reflected that today we were going to do very little in the way of justice; the heavens were safe from me.

  I walked up to the court clerk and pointed to my case. “Do you think we can get my client down before lunch?” I asked, a wistful note in my voice. I really didn’t want to come back; I had pleadings to draft on a breach of contract suit my Atlantic Avenue antique-dealer clients were bringing against a mirror restorer. Who kn
ew there were people that spent their whole lives resilvering old mirrors?

  God, the things you learn practicing law.

  “I’ll send the court officers right away,” the clerk promised. “But if we can’t get him down in ten minutes, I’ll have to put it over. Judge Rossi doesn’t like it when we go into the lunch hour.”

  I nodded, then walked back to the front row, traditionally reserved for lawyers and reporters. No reporters today; no other lawyers—until the door opened to admit Murray Singer.

  He was a natty little man, if your idea of high style was formed in 1955. Balding, gray-haired, pink-cheeked, he was the constant butt of judicial humor, and had been known to contribute some of his own to the otherwise dull proceedings. I’d been on trial with him once, and in response to my making motions in limine—motions for a ruling on the admissibility of evidence before the jury hears it—he suggested to the judge that we make our motions in Bimini instead.

  No one, least of all the very scholarly Judge Baumgartner, had laughed.

  He was a Court Street hack, pure and simple. The kind of guy who stood in the lobby of 120 Schermerhorn Street, the Criminal Court building, and handed out his cards to perfect strangers. The cards were printed on light pink cardboard so that an illiterate defendant could flash it at the arraignment judge and be recognized at once as a Singer client. Guys like Singer didn’t retire. Someday he’d grab his chest and go down like a tree in Jury One, having had The Big One at last.

  When I’d stormed the male bastions of law school back in the Year One, I had envisioned a future as a female Perry Mason. Hell, why not say it: a female Matt Riordan.

  There was every possibility I’d end my days as a female Murray Singer instead.

  On that depressing note, I opened my briefcase and took out my copy of New York magazine.

  The man I’d slept with, off and on, for four years stared out at me from the glossy page, his fading summer tan artificial-looking, his startling blue eyes an advertiser’s dream. Every wrinkle, every gray hair, only added to his mature masculine charm.

  I missed him. I missed his hands, well-scrubbed and manicured, like a doctor’s. I missed the little fold at the corner of his deep blue eyes. I missed the way those eyes shot fire as he laid a particularly complex evidence question in front of me at the dinner table.

  What was interesting was that I didn’t particularly miss the sex. I missed the friendship I hadn’t bargained on.

  The article began by describing the old movie poster on the wall of Matt Riordan’s office—a poster I’d given him after we discovered we both thought Jimmy Cagney’s best dramatic performance had come in a movie called City for Conquest. It was less well known than White Heat, but it was a gritty black-and-white gem.

  The article went on:

  “It was a city for conquest”—and Matthew Daniel Riordan was just the man to conquer it. Young, freshly graduated from Fordham Law School, he stepped into his first big case by sheer accident. He was called into night court to represent Thomas F. O’Hara, a night watchman charged with drunk driving. Instead, he ended up assigned to Thomas P. O’Hara, notorious hit man for the Westies, an Irish mob working out of Hell’s Kitchen. He got O’Hara released on one hundred thousand dollars bail—which may seem high, but the gangster was charged with a particularly brutal double murder (when the Westies say “heads will roll,” they aren’t speaking figuratively).

  He buys his suits at Barney’s, his shoes at Gucci’s, his shirts at Brooks Brothers. But he still buys his Irish whiskey at The Bells of Hell, a neighborhood bar in Inwood, at the northern tip of Manhattan. There they call him Matty, or even Robbie Riordan’s son—his father, a New York City bus driver, has been dead these ten years, but the people of the neighborhood have long memories, and stories of Robbie Riordan could fill an entire evening of drink and song at The Bells. Robbie, they say, was a darlin’ man, a darlin’ man. A wee bit too fond of the sauce, but a darlin’ man nonetheless.

  What they mean is that Robbie Riordan was an inconsequential man, a man whose life and death made little difference to other people. A man of charm and laughter and jokes and gentleness, but not a man to be greatly feared or respected. A darlin’ man.

  Matthew Riordan is not a darling man.

  In the four years I’d known him, Matt Riordan had told me less than nothing about his father. I’d gathered it was a sore subject and had learned not to ask. And now he was telling the world whatever it wanted to know about the most personal side of his life.

  He was in trouble. Deep trouble.

  Which was what the article went on to say. It was a neat summary of all the ways the United States attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York had tried to break Matt Riordan. First, they had him disqualified from representing Frank Cretella, successor to the notorious Donatello Scaniello. Then they forfeited a hefty fee he’d received from a Colombian client, on the grounds that it represented the proceeds of drug crimes.

  The latest skirmish: an about-to-be-voted indictment for bribery. They claimed he paid cash under the table for secret grand jury minutes.

  I could believe a lot of things about my former lover, but getting caught in a nickel-and-dime hustle like this wasn’t one of them. I was willing to bet he’d beat the rap.

  “Counselor, we’ve got your client,” the court offer said. I jumped up; time to go to work. I stepped lightly past the desk where the court clerk was explaining to Murray Singer that he’d have to come back after 2:15.

  I gave my client the bad news; I’d been on the phone to the D.A. the day before, and the offer was ten to twenty. No room for negotiation. This was his third armed robbery and he was going to do serious time.

  “I can’t be doin’ no ten to twenty,” Rafael Guzman moaned from his side of the bars. “The whole crime ain’t took but three minutes.”

  “Unfortunately, the fact that you’ve perfected the art of armed robbery to where you can pull a gun and get away with the cash register receipts in a mere three minutes is not—”

  “Oh, Jesus,” my client continued, drawing out the syllables in what was almost a genuine prayer. He dropped his head into his hands and moaned again.

  He sat on a bench in a metal holding pen. The walls were stone, but painted gunmetal gray; there were bars between us and a cold green metal table on which I rested my elbows and waited. My client was going to have to understand that he’d be spending at least the next ten years in rooms no more comfortable than this one. That gray would be the color and hard clanking the sound.

  “I went out to see the complaining witness,” I went on. “I took an investigator with me; we talked to her for a good twenty minutes. She saw you, Rafael. She remembered the tattoos on your arms, the—”

  “Lots of guys got these tattoos,” he protested. He rolled up a gray-green sleeve to show me. “They get them in jail all the time.” He pointed to the crudely drawn snake on the inside of his forearm and to the teardrop at the corner of his eye.

  “Great,” I said, shaking my head. “I can see myself now, standing in front of a jury. ‘Ladies and gentlemen, Rafael Guzman didn’t commit this crime; some other jamoke with a jailhouse tattoo did it.’ Think about it, Rafael; the only way to defend you is to admit you’ve got a record the size of the Staten Island phone book.”

  “Man, I don’ know,” he said, shaking his nearly shaved head. “All’s I know is I can’t be doin’ them double digits.”

  I looked at Rafael. Junkie-skinny, the shaved head showing nicks and scars where he’d sustained injuries. Wearing torn jeans that weren’t distressed in a factory for yuppie kids, and cheap sneakers worn down at the sides by his pigeon-toed feet. He was a mess. A mess who committed felonies for a living.

  What the hell was I going to use for a bargaining chip to get him a plea he could live with?

  I’d hoped my visit to the complaining witness would turn up something. Something like the fact that she was ninety-six and wore glasses with lenses the thickness of—


  She was in her fifties, with eyes sharp enough to see the tiny teardrop on Rafael’s cheek. If we went to trial, the ten to twenty he was being offered would seem like a dream; he was a persistent violent felony offender, in the words of the Penal Code, and he’d go away for life.

  A sentence he richly deserved. A sentence I was being paid to reduce as much as humanly possible. But how? I thought about it as I made my way back into the courtroom.

  I looked up as the judge entered and took the bench. I was already standing at counsel table, so I nodded instead of rising. Judge Rossi nodded back. He was a plump, genial man who liked long lunch hours and fast pleas. It was twenty minutes to one; if I could get him out of here in time to make it to Armando’s before the rest of the courthouse crowd, he’d be a friend for life. Or at least for the next ten minutes, which was all I needed.

  “Well, Counselor,” he said, fixing me with impatient eyes. “Have we got a plea?”

  I rolled the dice. I walked up to the bench and heaved a theatrical sigh. “We’re very close, Your Honor,” I said, lying through my teeth. “Very close. There’s just one little problem.”

  Pause for effect. Tease him. Make him ask.

  “And what’s that, Ms. Jameson?”

  I sighed again and gave him a wide-eyed stare. “My client says he can’t be doin’ them double digits.”

  It could have gone either way. He could have slammed his fist down on the bench and roared at the court officers to take my stubborn client back to the cells to think over his misspent life, and then lectured me about frivolity in the courtroom. Or he could have thrown back his curly head and let out a good strong laugh.

  Fortunately for Rafael and me, he laughed. Then he turned to my opponent and said, “How about it, Mr. D.A.? Ms. Jameson says her client can’t be doing those double digits. Can we come down a little on this one?”

  Howie Rosenthal pursed his thin lips. “If Ms. Jameson’s client can’t do the time, he shouldn’t—”

  “Do the crime,” I finished. I rolled my eyes; Judge Rossi said the words that were on the tip of my tongue.