Susan gets her back up, starts to say something, but cuts herself off.
“Look,” I say, “I don’t much like David right now, either. But I don’t want to lose him as a client. We can’t afford to lose him.”
Susan looks away for a long minute, then turns to face me again. “I don’t get it. David went to law school with you at Penn, an Ivy League school. And wasn’t he on the Law Review? He has to be a smart guy. A lot smarter than he’s looking right now.”
David is smart, but maybe not in the sense Susan means. And David did get himself on the Law Review. But it wasn’t due to his grades. Instead, he had to write his way on. No easy task even for the best legal writers and research wonks—for David it would have been impossible, because of his lack of patience. David never could have planted himself in the law library long enough to lose himself in the research necessary to author a paper of sufficient depth to win a spot on the Law Review.
But David had a secret weapon, a carefully cultivated asset that none of his competitors possessed. He had our roommate, Kevin Kratz, the smartest guy in our class. During our first year of law school, David invited Kevin to every ball game and concert and party he went to. David made sure that Kevin was never left standing alone in the middle of a crowd, that his beer mug was always full. And David was the one who persuaded Allen Davis and me to let Kevin live with us in the apartment we rented during our second year . . . when David would have to write his paper to win a place with that publication.
I read the paper David submitted under his name to the editorial staff. It was, in a word, brilliant. Exhaustively researched, tightly reasoned. Almost literary. The work would have been a source of pride to any Supreme Court justice’s law clerk. I had little doubt at the time that Kevin was proud of it, and I was certain David praised and thanked Kevin to no end for it.
And yet, at the time—and this may be a sad commentary on my own ability to judge people—I did not question at all the sincerity of David’s friendship with Kevin Kratz. Even when, at the end of our second year, David persuaded Kevin to lobby for him to become editor-in-chief, when Kevin clearly, and by leaps and bounds, was the better man for the position.
I shrug. “He’s definitely a smart man. Very smart.”
9
FRIDAY, AUGUST 10
It’s Friday morning and I’m staring at the face of Stanley Lipinski. Of the three corrupt cops identified by the press in connection with the grand-jury investigation, Lipinski is the one who’d planted himself at the local cop bar, essentially taunting the cops he’d snitched on to come for him. The story of Lipinski’s murder is playing out on the seven o’clock news on the small TV in our kitchen. My daughter and I are sitting on stools at the island in the middle of the kitchen, Gabby eating her Trix while I wait for Piper to finish frying the vegetable omelet we’ll share.
I know a lot of good cops. I could name fifty I’d be shocked to hear accused of corruption. Stanley Lipinski is not one of them. Lipinski viewed himself as the police-department version of a hockey team’s “enforcer.” Some cops get rough with suspects because they truly believe in the good-guys-bad-guys dichotomy and think the bad guys get what they deserve. But that wasn’t Stanley Lipinski. Stanley inflicted pain because he enjoyed it. Everyone—cops, perps, even prosecutors and defense attorneys—gave Stanley a wide berth.
But the bad guys, the real bad guys, will only put up with so much, so I wasn’t surprised when the Thirteenth District’s enforcer ended up dead. He had, after all, not only testified against his cohorts before the grand jury but also all but dared them to come and get him. Apparently, they did. Lipinski had gone down hard in a rapid-fire spray of bullets on the sidewalk just outside McCraven’s Tavern in North Philly. According to eyewitnesses, so many bullets had torn through his torso that Stanley was effectively disemboweled, his guts spilling onto the pavement while he remained upright, shouting, “Fuck you!”
When the story finishes, Piper turns from the TV to me, and I see that all the color has drained from her face. “They’re going after everyone who helped Jennifer Yamura with that story, aren’t they?” Before I can answer, she asks, “Have you heard from Tommy?”
“Not for a few days,” I say.
“Can you give him a call? Make sure he’s all right.”
“Why wouldn’t Tommy be all right?”
Piper turns back to the omelet, which is now overdone.
I stare at her back for a moment, wondering whether Tommy and Piper are keeping things from me. After Piper recovered from the shock of her visit to Tommy in prison, the two of them became close. Piper began writing to him. At first he didn’t reply, but Piper persisted, and Tommy eventually sent her a one-paragraph missive thanking her for her letters. He wrote that it made him feel good to know that someone on the outside was thinking about him. The next week, the floodgates opened. I went to the mailbox to find another letter from Tommy. The envelope was thick, and Piper told me it was ten pages long. She wouldn’t tell me what Tommy had written, and I didn’t press; I was overjoyed that Tommy and Piper were developing a relationship. I wanted him to become part of our family once he got out of prison, and Piper was laying the groundwork for that to happen, despite the poison her father had been feeding her about my brother. The day he was finally released, Piper came with me to pick him up at the prison.