“Smile, honey!” shouted the Mirror’s photographer.
Here at the bottom of the courthouse steps on Friday, March 9, a suddenly springlike day, Hazel had just opened her coat to reveal a pretty checkered jumper.
“What was the ‘Special Projects’ Fund for?” asked the reporter. “Did you ever see Mr. Harris take cash from it himself?”
“No,” said Hazel, answering the second question first. She held her pose, keeping the coat open with a white-gloved hand on her hip. “He’d just ask me to take out whatever amount he needed. I didn’t always know what it was for. Sometimes to pay some poor freelancer who had the wolf at the door and couldn’t wait for a check, sometimes just to pay Nicos.”
“Nicos?” asked the reporter, as he scribbled down the name.
“Mr. Harris’s barber.”
“Oh.”
Cuddles Houlihan nudged Hazel along by her posed, jutting elbow. Inside the courtroom, in a row toward the back, the two of them joined the rest of a contingent—including Fine, Nan, Spilkes, and Sidney Bruck—who had been ordered by Harris to attend Giovanni Roma’s trial. The editor-in-chief couldn’t reasonably go himself, but he wanted Gianni to realize that he still had friends at Bandbox. He also wanted Gianni to shut up.
Even the Wood Chipper was present, feigning solidarity with the rest of them, though he was actually here to keep an eye on things for Jimmy Gordon, who didn’t want his name to surface during the proceedings, either.
Judge Francis X. Gilfoyle—picked, surprisingly enough, by routine, legitimate means to preside over the State of New York v. John Roma—was carefully watched by Daisy, here doing double duty as Bandbox staffer and loyal girlfriend, as well as by a man wearing tinted glasses and a chalk-striped suit. This second observer did not bother to remove his hat or even rise when Gilfoyle entered the courtroom, a violation of judicial decorum that failed to earn him a rebuke from either the bench or the bailiff. Even with his dark glasses Daisy could recognize him as one of the “messengers” who continued to show up at the oddest hours on Beekman Place.
Everyone expected the trial to be a quick affair, no longer than a day or two, and it got going at a pace that guaranteed an even swifter conclusion.
The arresting officer testified that he had received an anonymous tip about suspicious activity at Mr. Roma’s restaurant. The informant—no, he didn’t know who it was; yes, it might have been a fellow officer—also suggested that he question Mr. Waldo Lindstrom, whose information eventually led to the arrest of Mr. Roma. “Yeah, the guy sitting right there in the green tie.”
A scurrying of reporters and sketch artists signaled Waldo’s arrival on the stand. He was here not because Max had decided to drop a nickel on him after all, but because the management of the Sherry-Netherland had had to call the police one recent night when he and his producer began to argue and throw things at each other. A radio and, less explicably, an egg beater had landed on the sidewalk of Fifty-ninth Street and nearly injured two pedestrians. The officers arriving at the hotel had recognized Waldo, and there went his trip to Haiti, at least for now.
Even more bored than he’d been the day Max visited, Waldo testified with a blank, straight face that Mr. Roma had tried to sell him illegal narcotics and caused him even greater shock by asking that payment be made through the performance of “certain unnatural and unlawful acts with my person,” a term Waldo had learned from the district attorney several minutes before.
Cross-examination was conducted not by the legal stumblebum Gianni had hired the morning after his arrest, but by Lawrence Goodheart, the lawyer Oldcastle used to keep on hand when they were closing Jimmy Gordon’s riskier pieces at Bandbox. Harris had gotten hold of him and was paying his fees—further reason, he hoped, for Gianni to keep his mouth closed.
Mr. Goodheart began by inquiring about whether the prosecution had offered the witness a deal in exchange for his testimony here today.
Waldo merely shrugged. Judge Gilfoyle instructed him, almost apologetically, to answer with an audible yes or no, if only for the sake of the court reporter.
Once Waldo uttered in the affirmative, Mr. Goodheart continued: “How is it, Mr. Lindstrom, that on the morning of February third you were found with narcotics on, as you might put it, your ‘person’?”
“Gianni put them into the pocket of my overcoat. He said I could try them and see if I liked them before I had to give him what he asked for.”
“A sort of no-obligation-for-thirty-days arrangement? The kind one might make with Montgomery Ward?”
The prosecutor objected; Mr. Goodheart went on to other matters.
“And is it your testimony, Mr. Lindstrom, that you never sampled any of these narcotics?”
“Of course not,” said Waldo.
“Of course not,” repeated Mr. Goodheart. “Wouldn’t it, however, be true that you showed no such hesitation some years back, in the state of Kansas, about experimenting with public drunkenness, shoplifting, and animal abuse of a kind more unnatural than anything Mr. Roma allegedly proposed for your precious ‘person’?”
Waldo shrugged again; Mr. Goodheart asked the court reporter to make a note of the gesture.
“Mr. Lindstrom, did you not, in the summer of 1925, escape from the Kansas State Penitentiary in Lansing?”
Waldo paused briefly before answering: “It was my understanding that I’d been paroled.”
General laughter followed, even from the man wearing dark glasses and a hat.
“Did the Manhattan district attorney’s office, as part of the arrangement for your appearance here today, promise to help straighten things out with the Kansas authorities?”
“Oh, termites and Topeka!” Waldo, exasperated only by the idea that he was expected to keep all these things straight, sighed loudly before Mr. Goodheart permitted him to step down.
He was followed on the stand by the defendant’s brother-in-law, Benjamin Harrison Gattopardi, at whom Gianni appeared to mouth the words Et tu, brutto? before Mr. Goodheart put a restraining hand on his forearm.
Yes, this new witness testified, he would occasionally supply Mr. Roma with wine for his restaurant. But he worked full-time in the electrical-supplies business, and when his brother-in-law urged him to procure narcotics, he had been stunned and disappointed. He’d introduced him to the man who’d provided them—no, he actually couldn’t recall the gentleman’s name—only because of family pressure. (Mr. Gattopardi, too, had received what he called “consideration” from the prosecutors.)
A few others, including a hopped-up police chemist, took the stand in quick succession, but Gianni himself never testified, a fact from which the jury was supposed to draw no inference, according to both Mr. Goodheart, during his summation, and Judge Gilfoyle in the course of his charge. Throughout these last phases of the proceedings, David Fine sat by Gianni at the defense table, and Daisy sent the judge supportive nods. Between encouragements she spared a wave of greeting to Cuddles, who she suspected was missing Becky. Once the jury had retired to deliberate, she went over to ask if he’d like to join her and the judge for lunch at Go-Lo’s, on Lafayette Street. He accepted.
At the restaurant Gilfoyle took obvious pleasure in Daisy’s chatter—much of it about the insights she’d been acquiring from Dr. Horne’s philosophy program on the radio—but he still appeared mighty nervous to Cuddles, who tried to keep things light: “Well, Judge, I see the Irish Vigilance Committee’s approved Mother Machree. Guess you won’t have to worry about any rioting Hibernian filmgoers being brought up before you.”
Gilfoyle smiled, and as the three of them waited for their food, he remained a model of jurisprudence, keeping conversation well away from Gianni’s case. He asked instead about “how your remarkable Mr. Stanwick is coming with his investigation of that boy’s disappearance. I enjoyed meeting him—not only Stanwick, as it happens, but the boy, too. A bright lad, eager to take everything in.” The judge seemed to be trying to concentrate on the happier portions of the occasion he was recalling. But his face soon turned grave. “That was quite an evening,” he said, nearly in a whisper.
“I missed a lot of it myself,” said Cuddles. “Huddled away in Oldcastle’s library.”
“Romance?” asked the countess, batting her eyes and imagining him on a leather sofa with Becky.
“Protection, mostly. From threatening presences.” He remembered how Becky had hustled him away from ’Phat.
“We were surprised by some unappetizing company ourselves,” Daisy told Cuddles.
“And who was that?”
Suddenly cautious, Daisy only let herself add: “People who do business with a friend of ours.” The judge restrained her with a gentle tap on her wrist. “There, there, dear.”
Cuddles figured they were talking about Rothstein. But he was only now realizing, from what the judge had said about Shep—Jesus, thought Cuddles, even I’m using the name now—that the kid might have been around the judge at the same time this “unappetizing company,” probably Rothstein’s goons, had shown up at the penthouse. Did the kid do something inconvenient in their presence?
Cuddles made a note to ask Max what tactics The Brain was inclined to employ in such a situation. (A few aspects of Rothstein’s behavior had been prudentially soft-pedaled in the Bandbox profile.)
Meanwhile, Cuddles tucked into his moo goo gai pan, a dish he’d had many times at Manking but only now realized was supposed to be made with chicken.
By 2:30, he and the judge and Daisy were back in court for the guilty verdict on Gianni, whose only real crime, most of the spectators thought, had been developing a case on a miscreant like Waldo.