Chapter 42
Wednesday morning at eleven, Eric was in the office of assistant district attorney Alice Frazier, who was prosecuting Steven Perrault for soliciting the murder of a schoolmate. Frazier believed she had an open and shut case but had offered a plea bargain sentence of one year in a juvenile facility and three years’ probation. Perrault’s lawyer, however, was going for broke, hoping for no time to be served—since the family feared hat would happen to Steven ‘inside.’
Frazier was drilling Eric in his testimony in preparation or the trial to take place the following week. He was starting o sweat. “Take it easy,” he begged. “I’ll confess to anything, only stop the torture.”
“You have to be prepared for what the defense attorney is going to do to you” was her sharp retort.
There was a tap on the door, which opened slightly. Steinberg peeked his head in. “I think I’m done,” said Eric. “You can grill the lieutenant now.”
“I’ve already spoken to the lieutenant,” returned Frazier coolly. She obviously didn’t have much use for either one of her witnesses.
“That’s right,” agreed Steinberg. “I knew you were on the schedule and decided to come by. I think I owe you a lunch. I don’t want to be accused of having taken graft of any sort.”
Eric gazed at him suspiciously. “I don’t do hot dogs,” he retorted.
“Next Monday at nine sharp. Nine sharp,” Frazier shouted into the hall, as the two men fled her office.
“Nice broad. Swell disposition,” Steinberg said.
Eric mused. Steinberg was a little old for Katherine. On the other hand, he had a certain beaten, gritty quality that a woman might find attractive. “Are you married?” he asked the cop.
“Twenty years.” Steinberg smiled. “To the same woman, yet. So how goes it with that cute little girl with the great legs?”
“Hmm,” responded Eric. “It was going good. Then I inadvertently detoured. Where are we headed?” Had he explained he didn’t do any pushcart food whatsoever?
“There a salad bar near here. With tables. I know you goyim—non-Jews—need to sit down to digest.”
Steinberg led Eric through a maze of downtown streets into a Korean deli complete with Italian, Greek, Japanese, and American food specialties of every variety. Eric filled a small plastic container with the least greasy of the thirty or so ethnic and new cuisine dishes. While Steinberg was paying, Eric forged ahead to scout a location. The place was filling up, but he found a table where the other two seats were already occupied—by two uniformed officers, probably coming from one of the nearby courts.
One of the cops was smoking. “Put out the cigarette,” Eric told him flatly. He stared at the cop’s badge. The cop, not knowing who Eric was, but perhaps suspecting by the tone of the stranger’s voice that here was a plainclothes officer who outranked him, crushed the cigarette after barely a moment’s hesitation. Steinberg, coming along behind, laughed. The two unformed cops looked at Steinberg, perhaps recognized him vaguely, and turned their silent attention to their lunches.
“You didn’t tell me that what’s-his-name was an out-and-out drunk,” said Eric, being discrete because maybe the cops knew Captain Ryan.
“That’s the thin-blue-line thing,” said Steinberg. “We don’t bad-mouth a fellow officer, especially one who has a lot of clout.”
“I clouted him one on Sunday,” Eric told Steinberg. “He was a little off his feed and tried to strangle me. I had the feeling he was disappointed in something I had done or failed to do.”
“I wouldn’t take these things personally,” advised Steinberg. He smiled, but that expression faded at once. “Actually, I came by today because the person in question called me up yesterday bitching about you. He’d like to fire you, but he knows he’s stuck with you until the investigation is complete. However, he called another old pal of his in the department and had him run a couple of checks on you. By chance, his old pal is an even older pal of mine and he came to me with the information first, because Ryan gave him the impression that you and I are close.” Steinberg smiled again. “I denied everything, of course.”
Eric bit into a piece of Korean sushi which included a fat chunk of ersatz crab. He hated the stuff. But not enough to forego eating it.
“You neglected to mention to me that you were arrested in Miami,” said Steinberg.
“Oh, yeah,” remembered Eric. “It’s not the arrests that count, you know, it’s the convictions. Was that the only arrest on my ‘sheet,’ as you guys call it?”
Steinberg’s eyes widened. “Were there others?”
“In this country, only one. A brief arrest by the ATF in California. A conspiracy to commit felonious bombing,” Eric guessed.
“There can’t have been any such charge,” protested Steinberg. “All bombings are felonies.”
“This was especially felonious,” Eric insisted. “It’s good to have a little bit of a record, don’t you think? It allows people to take you seriously.”
“What happened with the ATF charge?”
“Oh, that.” Eric shrugged. “They must have felt silly and expunged my record.”
“And the murder in Miami?”
“That’s what my sister keeps saying to me. I think you and she would get along good. If you ever decide to ditch your wife.”
“No, really.”
“I didn’t kill anyone,” Eric insisted, then thought about it. “In Miami,” he amended. He noticed that one of the cops was looking in his direction. He looked back. The officer diverted his gaze. “Was that all you were worried about?” Eric asked Steinberg.
“We’re in the middle of a joint NYPD/FBI investigation. We wouldn’t want it to blow up in our faces. If Ryan goes to the feds and says you’re dirty, they may cancel the whole spiel and then he’ll fire you.”
“No pension?” Eric complained. He laughed. “The arrest in Miami occurred when I was looking into the Westlake theft of information. A guy I was chasing had an accident with some other guys and one of them wound up no longer breathing.”
He didn’t care to tell Steinberg that these ‘some other guys’ included Alistair Morgan, the subject of the joint NYPD/FBI inquiry. That would bring Kitani into it. For some reason Eric couldn’t define, he hesitated to do that. He reassured himself by swearing to himself to take care of Kitani, once the Morgan thing was over. He would help law enforcement follow the one strand, then he would do something about the other.
Steinberg frowned. “Something else my pal showed me.”
Eric nodded. The sautéed eggplant was sort of good, actually.
“Your service record.”
Eric looked up expectantly.
“It’s classified,” said Steinberg, as if that implied Eric was a little bit unclean.
“Oh, yeah,” Eric acknowledged. “Someone told me that once. You know, when the Strategic Defense Initiative collapsed, the military had to come up with some type of alternate strategic weapon. After a couple of decades of pondering, they settled on me.”
Steinberg looked at him for a while without saying a thing. “You’re a weird guy,” he finally commented. “If I didn’t know better, I’d guess you were a cop.”
“I was on the dark side of the force,” explained Eric after a while, biting into a hardboiled egg. “Covert operations in Latin America. Making their countries safe for our big money interests.” He laughed as if it were a joke, but his eyes met Steinberg’s to show that he was absolutely serious.