Hostile Witness

“Did he bring anything with him?”

“Yes.”

“What?”

“He brought me cocaine.”

I stepped back from the podium for a moment to let the last answer sink in. The points were being laid out and I wanted the co

“Did you take the cocaine that Mr. Bissonette offered?” I asked.

“Yes.”

“Why, Miss Ashland, if you had been drug-free for over two years?”

“Because I missed it, and I was lonely, and I was disgusted that I had allowed a stiff like Zack back into my bedroom. Because I am not as strong a woman as I would like, Mr. Carl.”

“Did you become addicted again?”

“Yes.”

“Did you only get cocaine from Mr. Bissonette?”

“No.”

“Where else?”

“Anywhere I could.”

“Did you have another primary source?”

“Yes.”

“Who, Ms. Ashland?”

“Norvel Goodwin,” she said.

“The same man who had been selling out of that crack house on Fifty-first Street, the same man who Jimmy Moore had beaten with a chair?”

“Yes.”

“Now, did there come a time that someone else found out about your renewed drug use?”

“Yes.”

“And who was that?”

“Chet Conca

She had made still another mistake that I had to correct. “You mean the councilman, don’t you?”

“No,” she said. “It was Chet who found out.”

“And then Chester told the councilman?”

“No,” she said. “Chet came right to me.”

I gave her another chance. “So when did the councilman come over?”

“He never did. Chet had the limousine that night, he often used it, and he came over to my apartment after he found out.”

“And you spoke?”

“Yes.”

“And then he told the councilman?”

“No, that’s not what happened. When he came over he was very upset, agitated. He demanded to know how I had started up again with drugs and when I told him that it was Bissonette he flew into a rage.”

“It was the councilman in the rage, wasn’t it?”

“No,” she said, shaking her head. “No. You’re not listening. It was Chet. He was often my beard on evenings when Jimmy wanted to bring his wife to a reception and then see me afterwards, and he began to fall in love with me. We had sex once, one lonely evening, and it seemed to be important to him. I used to tease him about it, but it was real, I could see that. So when he found out about Bissonette he was furious, as angry as if I had been cheating on him. And the drugs, that made him even angrier. I pleaded with him not to tell the councilman, because I knew how angry he would get, how violent. He promised me he wouldn’t, that he would take care of it himself. He said he would take care of it, that he had been stiffed out of another quarter of a million, that they had dropped him like a sucker and that by dealing with Bissonette he could take care of two birds with one bullet. That’s what he said. I begged him not to do anything stupid but he told me not to worry about it, that he would take care of everything. And then he left. That’s the last I saw of him that night. The next day I heard that Zack had been beaten into a coma. I was terrified.”

I stared at her, shocked into silence, shocked enough to let her talk on and on, and talk on and on she did. While her other answers were short, two or three sentences at the most, this response seemed to last forever, and I felt helpless to stop her. I was so stu

In a weak voice I asked the judge for a moment, which he granted, and I walked unsteadily to Chester at the defense table. The doubt in his face had been replaced with anger. I leaned over him and whispered.

“Is any of this true?” I asked.

“No,” he hissed.

“You fucked her, didn’t you?”

“You did too,” said Chester viciously. “So what? The rest of that is crap. What are you doing to me? What are you letting them do to me? You’ve sold me out.”

Still leaning over Conca

The feeling I had in that instant was like falling down a pit, falling without a parachute, without hope, fall falling. My stomach collapsed, my knees buckled, my eyes teared wildly, and spots appeared before me as my consciousness dipped. All I wanted to do at that moment was to heave and if I had anything in my stomach, if I had eaten Raffaello’s damned ca

Part V. A Peel

57

ONCE AGAIN I WAS RIDING the marble-lined elevator to the fifty-fourth floor of One Liberty Place, rising to the offices of Talbott, Kittredge and Chase, coming as a visitor, not a member of the caste, coming as a supplicant, as one of the unworthy. But on this ride, at least, I was no longer lugging along a deep-seated resentment. I had been resentful of my exclusion from the hallways of the rich and powerful when I believed I belonged by right of merit, of talent, by right of my i

There was nothing I could do to salvage the trial after Veronica, my star witness, buried Chester with her testimony. I finally snapped out of my self-pitying stupor and had her declared a hostile witness, so that I could cross-examine her, and then went at her tooth and tong, attacking her credibility, attacking her story, attacking her lies. And they were lies, yes. She had told me the truth in her apartment the black night I subpoenaed her. I had no doubt but that it was Jimmy Moore who had taken that quarter of a million, cash, and handed it over to Norvel Goodwin, resurrecting with fresh capital Goodwin’s moribund grip on the crack cocaine market in Philadelphia. I had no doubt but that Jimmy Moore had killed Zack Bissonette with the Mike Schmidt autographed baseball bat, that it was Jimmy Moore who had battered him into a coma and left him sucking air through the blood oozing out of his mangled face. But with all of my hammering, all of my badgering, all of my bombast, I was not able to shake her story. My only hope was to put myself on the stand and contradict her. I was the only one who could impeach her with what she had told me that night in her apartment and so I passionately requested that Judge Gimbel let me testify.