“I need to talk to him, Jill.” The cell phone was both conduit and barrier. Ted wanted to reach through it and shake her.
Gallagher’s was his fortress. He was in his usual spot, the back booth by the window, with a partial view of the street. The front door and the whole tavern were wide open in front of him. The bartender had the desk sergeant at the 110th Precinct on speed dial. Russian mobsters were not welcome.
The noon deadline had passed. Ted had been trying to connect with the Judge for hours. Calling Jill was his Hail Mary pass.
“Call his office,” she said.
“I tried that.” When Ted had told the secretary he wanted to speak to Con Fitzmaurice, she had said he was in luck because the Judge had “just walked in.” But when she came back on the line a minute later, he had not yet arrived. Ted gave her credit for trying to sound convincing. “He’s not taking my calls.”
“I don’t want to be involved in anything like this, Ted.”
“Like what? Just give him my message, and tell him I’m ready to talk. He’s going to want to hear what I have to say.”
“Will this help Jacqueline?”
Jackie deserved everything coming her way, but Ted wasn’t going to lie to Jill. If she thought he was lying, he would lose her—and he wasn’t ready for that. Besides, Ted needed her.
“She’s in trouble,” he said. “I don’t think that’s any secret. If I don’t talk to the Judge, she will take the fall.”
He’d left out a few details, but everything he’d said was true.
“I’ll call you back.” She hung up.
Ted let out a long-held breath.
“Did she go for it?”
Lester’s face came into focus. Ted pushed away his coffee. It had grown cold and had been bitter to start with. “She’s calling him. We wait. You want a drink? I could use a shot of something.”
“I might need a pain pill later on. I’d better not start drinking.”
“I admire your restraint, but I want a jitters killer. What should I get?”
“You’re not a whiskey drinker,” Lester said.
His father drank scotch. The smell of it gave him a headache. “I stick to beer. Usually.”
“These aren’t usual times. Vodka. There’s no sense in wasting good bourbon if you don’t have the taste for it. Vodka’ll get the job done. See if they keep a bottle on ice. It’ll go down a lot easier.”
The lunch crowd had come and gone. Ted saluted Paulie McGirk in the mirror as he passed. Paulie’s eyes were open, but Ted wasn’t sure there were any functioning nerve cells behind those bloodred orbs.
Lili’s eyebrows shot up when he asked her for the shot, but she pulled a blue-labeled bottle of Smirnoff out of the ice and poured a hefty slug.
“You celebrate something?” she asked.
“Not exactly,” he said and returned to the booth.
He braced for the burn, but the cold liquid went down like silken ice. A warm glow spread out from his belly, reaching fingers, lips, and cheeks moments later.
“Oh, shit,” Ted said. “It works.”
“One billion satisfied customers,” Lester said.
“You want anything to eat?” Ted asked. He’d been too jittery to think about food before.
“Like maybe a smoothie?” Lester flashed a metal-crusted grin.
“Right. Sorry.”
Ted’s cell phone rang. Jill.
“What did he say?” he asked.
“I don’t feel good about this,” she said.
“Will he call me?”
“No. He said he won’t talk on the phone.” She sounded small and frightened.
Her paranoia must have been contagious—or the Judge already had a strong case of his own. “Okay. Thanks for trying.”
“But he’ll meet you.”
That was interesting, but now Ted’s own paranoia fluttered in his chest. All he said was “Ah.”
“What?” The single word exploded in his ear.
“Did he mention a place? A time?” Ted sensed a trap. Hired thugs wouldn’t grab him inside the Century Club, but there would be no way to avoid them if they wanted to take him on the street. A neutral location, on the other hand, might mean that Ted could actually trust the old bastard.
“Keller v. Zuckerman/Scotto LLC. One o’clock tomorrow. He said you’d know what that meant.”
A complicated case that had dragged through the system for years. A pair of shady lawyers had bought buildings in East New York and converted them to affordable-housing units, using government grants. Once these two sharks filled the apartments with Section 8 tenants, they had leveraged the buildings with loans from banks and private lenders, borrowing more than the properties could have ever drawn at auction. Then the mortgage crisis swept through Brooklyn, and Zuckerman/Scotto LLC stopped paying. For anything.
Everybody sued, but the courts were swamped, and foreclosures took forever. Misters Zuckerman and Scotto managed to collect three years’ rent from their tenants without paying a dime for taxes, interest, insurance, maintenance, or heating fuel. Zuckerman, despite a vigorous defense by Hasting, Fitzmaurice, and Barson, eventually went to jail and was, no doubt, still there.
Scotto wasn’t so lucky. On his way home to Staten Island one night, a delivery van sideswiped him on the Verrazano Bridge. When Scotto got out of his car to exchange insurance information with the van driver, two men burst out of the side door, grabbed the lawyer, and boosted him over the rail. Two hundred twenty-eight feet later, he hit the water on an incoming tide. His body was recovered near a pier at the end of Bay Ridge Ave.
It was Ted’s first real-life lesson in the difference between justice and the law.
Ted understood the Judge’s code. Lionel Keller, a tenant who had merely wanted his heat turned on, had lived in a Zuckerman/Scotto-owned three-building enclave on Dumont Avenue. HFB LLC had been forced to step down as counsel to the commercial real estate company while pursuing Zuckerman’s criminal appeals. Ted, having been lead counsel to that company, followed the progress of the various suits. Mr. Keller sought to recoup rent after living in his apartment for three years with no heat and intermittent water service. He was represented pro bono by a top-tier law firm that took his case all the way to Albany and the New York State Court of Appeals. Keller lost. Judge Fitzmaurice cast the deciding vote.
That was Ted’s second lesson.
He had no idea what had become of the unfortunate Mr. Keller, but the buildings were still there. It had been a rough neighborhood back then and probably still was. There was a good chance that Ted and the Judge would be the only white faces in sight. Loitering Russian mobsters would have nowhere to lurk. It meant that Ted could trust the Judge—possibly.
All Lester and Ted had to do was stay alive until one o’clock the next day.