Rough Justice Page 5

  HONK! HONK!

  Bobby thumbed to the puppy ads in the back. He’d buy himself a dog, a pedigreed dog, as soon as he could move out of his shithole apartment and get his own house. He wanted a place in Delaware County that he could make into a kennel. He could become whatever you called it when you had a dog kennel. A breeder.

  Bobby knew all about dogs. He knew the names of all the breeds, even hard ones like vizsla, and he could draw a pretty good picture of a rottweiler. Bobby went to the dog show every year when he wasn’t in the joint and he would spend all day there, drinking strawberry smoothies, eating soft pretzels, and petting the pooches. It was a good show because you could hang with the breeders. They always had big spreads of food in the aisles of cages, and they were like a group.

  HONK!

  Bobby knew he would make a good dog breeder. It would be hard to sell the puppies, but he’d have to be professional, not get too attached. He turned the page. There was a picture of a little brown and white dog sitting on a plaid dog bed. It looked like the dog from Frasier. Bobby was pretty sure the Frasier dog was a Jack Russell terrier and bet the dog in the photo was one, too. To test himself, he covered the caption with his thumb. “A Jack Russell terrier,” he said aloud, to lock in his guess.

  HONK! HONK!

  Bobby lifted up his thumb and squinted at the caption. He was nearsighted, but he didn’t care if he went blind as a bat, he wasn’t wearing glasses. Bobby held the magazine closer and the little letters came into focus. Jack Russell terrier!

  HONK!

  7

  Judy Carrier stood outside the office building that housed Rosato & Associates on Locust Street, shaking her head in disgust. Erect was such a pill. She knew Judy would never leave Mary in the lurch. What kind of rock climber would leave a friend dangling by a rope? Judy sighed. Score another one for the forces of evil. It probably took that level of ruthlessness to be successful, but Judy wasn’t willing to pay the price.

  She pulled her ski cap down to her eyebrows against the blowing snow. The sky was an opaque gray that poured snowflakes. The weather report said the snow was falling at ten inches an hour. Judy loved it. Winter was one of the things she liked best about the East, especially a snowstorm this huge. It was Nature after assertiveness training. Reminding everybody that the natural hierarchy was greater than partners, associates, and secretaries.

  But Judy had to get somewhere, and fast. She scanned the street. A caterpillar of traffic inched past her. How would she get there? Her car was parked on the street near her apartment and undoubtedly a snowcap by now. It would take too long to dig it out, much less drive it anywhere. Judy didn’t have time to wait for a bus and a cab was an impossibility. Erect had taken the rental car, and it was too far to walk. The city was emptying out; soon the cars would be gone. Only the snow would be left, piling up on the street. Light, dry, flaky.

  Perfect.

  Judy planted her right pole until she hit asphalt, then skied forward on her left leg, gliding into powder so deep it buried her ski. She torqued her trunk easily and skied forward with her right leg, slipping into the natural swinging rhythm of cross-country skiing. Side to side, skating forward, in a yellow Patagonia parka and snow pants. It was less than an hour later and Judy was on her way, skiing through the inner city. It was fun. Just like Valley Forge, except for the crack vials.

  She exhaled in deep lungfuls that puffed in front of her like a toy locomotive. Judy was sweating in no time despite the wind chill and blizzard conditions. It was growing dark and snow muffled the last of the workaday noises. Judy heard only her own panting, the sssshhing of her skis, and the cruel whip of the wind as her skis flew under the snow. She skied southwest, taking as many side streets as possible. Only a few cars braved the streets, their headlights piercing the flurries. Traffic got scarcer the farther out Judy skied and soon she was the only sign of life on the snow-covered street.

  Judy enjoyed the growing sensation of solitude; it was the way she felt climbing, where it was only her and the rock. She dug her poles in and kept pushing. By the time she reached Grays Ferry, she felt completely relaxed. Her heart pumped happily and her muscles were warm and limber. It wasn’t so wacky, skiing to get somewhere. At least no wackier than this assignment.

  Going back to the scene of the crime, almost a year later. It made absolutely no sense. If the Commonwealth had found evidence incriminating Steere, it hadn’t come from the murder scene. All the conditions had changed. The carjacking happened in late spring, not winter, and at midnight, not in the daytime. The assignment was absurd. Still, Judy popped out of her skis, left them and her poles by the curb, and walked, suddenly light-footed, to the spot under the Twenty-fifth Street Bridge where the carjacking had occurred.

  Grays Ferry, the city’s old slaughterhouse district, was a neighborhood marred by abandoned homes, deserted warehouses, and racial strife. The Twenty-fifth Street Bridge, which used to carry an elevated railroad through the neighborhood to points west, now cut a rotting swath to nowhere. The massive concrete pillars that buttressed it had eroded, their rusted reinforcement rods protruding like exposed ribs, and the underside of the bridge had crumbled off in chunks. Icicles spiked from wide, jagged cracks rent in its bed, where its joints had expanded and finally split open. The bridge platform made a long roof over Twenty-fifth Street, but it was low. A grimy sign on a pillar read WARNING — MINIMUM CLEARANCE 13 FEET, 2 INCHES.

  Dopey assignment. Judy stood in the street directly under the bridge, where the double center line disappeared under a dusting of snow. Two lanes under the bridge ran in opposite directions, and there was almost no traffic because of the blizzard. The bridge sheltered Judy from the snow, but a bracing wind snapped between the pillars and she felt her eyes tear in the frigid air. The carjacking of their client had taken place in the right lane, westbound. Judy’s wet gaze fell on the spot.

  The first time she’d visited the crime scene, blood had stained the gritty asphalt in a lethal pool. Judy had never seen a crime scene before and had stared at the blood for a long time, trying to appear professional, which was code for emotionless. The police had taped a cliched outline of the body in the street and had set tiny cards, folded and numbered, next to a bloodstain and a bullet casing, like grisly place cards. Now the bloodstain was covered by snow, as any leftover evidence would be. Boy, was this dopey. Creepy and dopey.

  Judy’s muscles tightened in the cold and she walked stiffly under the bridge to the cross street where the killing occurred. She couldn’t imagine what evidence the D.A. could have on Steere. He might have overreacted, but who could question someone in that position? Judy mentally reconstructed the crime. Steere had been driving home after a fund-raising dinner at the University Museum. The businessman had no date, even though he was Philly’s most eligible bachelor. He’d been heading to his town house in Society Hill, but he’d drunk a little too much and took a wrong turn from Penn. It could have happened to anybody; Judy had gotten lost in the University Avenue area herself when she first moved to Philadelphia from Palo Alto.

  Judy blinked against the snowflakes that strayed under the bridge. To her left was a round concrete pillar, one of the line bordering both sides of the street. The pillars were thick, about four feet in diameter, easily wide enough for a man to hide behind. That was what had happened to Steere. It was past midnight, and he had stopped at the cross street under the bridge for the traffic light to turn red. Steere had been driving with the car radio cranked up. Judy liked that. It was the only thing she liked about Elliot Steere.

  There’d been no other traffic that night and no one on the street. It had been warm and muggy, a preview of a typical Philadelphia summer, so Steere had put the top down on his convertible, a pearl-white Mercedes two-seater. The car was new at the time of the carjacking, and when Judy had inspected it in the police impound lot, its pristine enamel was sullied by a spray of dried blood. Judy had to examine the splatter pattern, standing behind Erect and her blood expert. The expert
found the pattern consistent with Steere’s account. Erect would have fired him if he hadn’t.

  Judy imagined Steere at the stoplight in the dead of night, sleepy and slightly buzzed behind the wheel of an expensive convertible. Suddenly, a large man jumps from behind a pillar. Steere thinks about hitting the gas, but the man yanks open the convertible door, sticks a knife at Steere’s neck, and demands the Mercedes. Steere gets out of the car in fear, intending to surrender. He takes his gun with him just in case. But the carjacker slashes Steere’s cheek, and Steere sees his own blood arc into the air, feels its warm rain on his face. He fights for his life. The gun fires while the two men struggle. The carjacker crumples to his knees and becomes the taped outline.

  Judy shuddered as she stared at the white snow sprinkled on the street like so much baby powder and imagined the rich, red blood that was spilled. She even knew its composition: tests showed the carjacker’s blood was Type O, and Steere’s was AB. It had been Judy’s job on the Steere case to maintain the trial exhibits, but nothing in them was helping her now. She squatted and brushed snow away from the spot with her hand, but found herself distracted by the snow’s fine texture. Judy had been painting since she broke up with Kurt, who had left some of his art supplies behind. She was enjoying it and thought it made her more observant than she used to be.

  Judy straightened and brushed off her knee. Everywhere was whiteness, the only splotch of color the traffic light at the cross street as it blinked from yellow to red, as it did the night Steere was attacked. Judy watched the traffic lights under the bridge changing and twinkling, their rich hues set in vivid relief against the snow. The red light glowed the brightest, tinging the icicles on its metal hood a crimson hue. The green registered cartoony, like green Dots candy. The yellow burned a hot circle like the sun; a dense chrome yellow, a Van Gogh color. Judy thought of haystacks and sunflowers and the rich gold of the artist’s straw hat in a self-portrait. Judy could never get the yellows right in her own work.

  Funny. Yellow, red, then green. Judy hadn’t noticed it before and she wouldn’t have noticed it at all but for the contrast between the snow and the colors. Under the bridge, where Steere had been attacked, the traffic lights were mounted sideways. Horizontally. They were bolted to metal frames under the buttressed ceiling of the bridge, maybe because of the low clearance. Thick covered wires snaked to the metal panel where the traffic lights sat in a row. Red was the leftmost circle, the yellow was in the middle, and the green light was at the right.

  Odd. Judy couldn’t recall seeing a traffic light set up this way elsewhere in the city, or at least it was uncommon. Nor did she remember it from her initial visit, when she’d been focused on the blood and the horror of the crime. Judy blinked at the traffic light, which blinked back. Colors shining bright against the white backdrop. The whiteness was just a blank sheet to her, without color of its own. Try as she might, Judy couldn’t appreciate white as a color, only absence of color, and she couldn’t imagine a world without color.

  Then she remembered Steere’s medical records, a joint exhibit of a hospital report. Steere had been taken to the hospital after the carjacking and an ER surgeon had stitched the slash under his eye. Another doctor had given him an eye test and noted that his vision was blurry. But Judy was thinking of the note in the medical records, Dichromatism. Color blindness. She had asked Steere about it later, and he’d said he was color blind and couldn’t distinguish between red and green. Judy had wondered how he drove a car, but figured he knew which light was on top. Everybody knew that. Red on the top.

  Wait a minute. Judy watched the traffic light under the bridge blink from red to green, sideways. How did Steere know the traffic light had turned red if the panel was mounted horizontally? There was no reason or logic to red being on the left. It could just as easily have been the other way around. There was no way to know, if you were color blind. Even if Steere did know it, he hadn’t mentioned it in any of his interviews and he had been questioned in depth about the details.

  Judy’s heartbeat quickened. If Steere couldn’t tell whether the traffic light was red, why did he stop, especially in this rough neighborhood? If you weren’t sure a light was red or green and there was no traffic, wouldn’t you go anyway? Was there something fishy about Steere’s story? Had he meant to kill the man? Was this what the D.A. had learned?

  Judy turned and hurried back to her skis. She wanted to talk to Mary about it before Erect got back. She pressed her boots into her ski bindings, slipped her hands into her pole straps, and took off for the office. It was almost dark and the snow showed no signs of letting up.

  Judy skiied through the snowstorm, her eyes drawn to every light on the route back. Flurries swirled around traffic lights in whorls of red and eddies of green. Flakes swooped in fanciful halos around the white streetlights, standing out like impastoed brushstrokes against the night sky. The scene reminded Judy of The Starry Night, then of Van Gogh himself, and she found herself wondering how someone who appeared completely normal could, in reality, be utterly, truly, insane.

  8

  Mary DiNunzio slumped in front of the computer in her office and stared guiltily out the window at the falling snow. It was dark, and her best friend was out in a blizzard in the worst part of town because of her. The radio on Mary’s desk reported that the temperature had dipped to five degrees, which felt like minus thirty with the wind chill. She snapped off the radio and pressed Judy to the back of her mind, but still couldn’t concentrate.

  Where was Marta? How much time was left? She glanced at her clock, a fake Waterford her parents had given her. 6:05. Shit. She had to keep working to have an answer on time. Marta had assigned Mary to read all the statements Steere made to the police and the press to see if there were any inconsistencies in his story. It was a stupid assignment, and Mary was having predictably lousy luck so far. She’d already read through the file, but it was completely consistent. Discouraged, Mary took a gulp of coffee from a mug that read FEMINAZI. At Rosato & Associates, even the dishware was political.

  1955 of 2014 articles, said the computer.

  Mary’s brain buzzed with the caffeine. She used to drink a lot of coffee at Stalling, but at Rosato, coffee was a cult thing, with Bennie as Our Lady of the Natural Filters. Bennie’s latest crusade was that the coffee wasn’t hot enough, so she was actually perking the stuff on the electric stove in old-fashioned tin pots, like Mary’s parents did. Mary sipped the scorching brew, winced in pain, and hit the ENTER key.

  ELLIOT STEERE CHARGED WITH MURDER, read the headline, reduced to computer-byte size rather than tabloid screamer. Mary skimmed the first paragraph. The Philly newspapers, online at their own snazzy web site, had bitched about Elliot Steere since his rise in real estate development. Mary scrolled backward in time.

  TRIUMPH BUILDING A LOSS, said a subhead, and the reporter detailed how Steere had bought the 100,000-square-foot building in 1975, a year after it was designated historic, with the stated intention of restoring it for condos. But the renovations never happened and Steere fell behind on the maintenance. Every year, Licenses & Inspections fired off a packet of citations for code violations, like a volley of blanks. Steere defended with lawsuits that tied the property up in litigation. In the meantime, the historic building crumbled. The story was repeated throughout the blocks of the city.

  Mary sipped scalding coffee as she read. The article contained a litany of complaints against Steere. The preservationists and Chamber of Commerce vilified him. Nobody was more vocal than the mayor of Philadelphia, Peter Montgomery Walker.

  “Elliot Steere is bringing down this city to his level,” said Mayor Pete Walker in an exclusive interview with this reporter. “Frankly, by that I mean the gutter.”

  According to the mayor’s chief of staff, Jennifer Pressman, Mr. Steere presently owns 150 parcels in Center City, 82 of which have current fire and building code violations. In addition to his Center City properties, Mr. Steere is reputed to own hundreds of rowhomes in t
he city’s outlying neighborhoods, with deeds recorded through a complex series of holding companies. Ms. Pressman said that the Mayor’s Office is currently spearheading a review of these holdings.

  Mary’s conscience nagged at her. She was born and raised in Philly and was a huge fan of the mayor’s. He’d managed to turn the city around and had plans to go further. The newspapers called it the “Philadelphia Renaissance,” and it included a huge advertising budget to attract tourists, an Avenue of the Arts project that would build museums, a concert hall, theaters, and an entertainment complex on the Delaware River. The jewel in the crown was to be the newly developed historic district:

  The city has launched a campaign to enliven the mile-square historic district, including a $20 million Visitors Center called Independence National Historical Park, to be built adjacent to Independence Hall and the Liberty Bell, as well as the nearby Colonialera neighborhoods of Old City and Society Hill. Plans include the building of a Constitution Center on the mall adjacent to the United States Courthouse, unifying the area, according to Ms. Pressman.

  All of these plans depended on the appearance of downtown Philly, which was unfortunately influenced to a large degree by Elliot Steere, who refused to repair his vast number of buildings. Why? Steere would waste his properties until the city paid his price to reclaim and restore them. He knew how critical his holdings were to the mayor’s plans and he wouldn’t sell until the price peaked.

  Mary felt a second wave of guilt. Her hometown was trying to make a comeback and Steere was blackmailing it. Almost single-handedly obstructing the city’s turnaround and, as a result, torpedoing the mayor’s reelection. Mary bit her lip. She’d hoped she’d be working for the good guys when she joined Rosato. Hellfire licked at her pumps.