Sleepers

His right hand whipped at the ball, sending it higher than the serve, faster, forcing me to move back, the soles of my sneakers slipping on a thin slab of ice. I watched as the ball bounced over my head.

'That's six for me, loser,' Fat Mancho said. 'Two for you.'

'You never play this game,' I said, my breath coming heavy. 'How can you be good?'

'You never seen me play, fool,' Fat Mancho said. 'I was your age, I was all-spic. Played the best. Beat the best.'

I looked over his shoulder and saw Carol walking toward us, a cup of coffee in one hand and a cold beer in the other.

'Good news,' I said. 'It's halftime.'

We sat against the handball wall, sitting on top of three copies of the Sunday Daily News, Carol and I sharing the coffee, Fat Mancho slurping gulps of Rheingold.

'How's Irish holdin' up?' Fat Mancho asked about Michael.

'I only know what I see in court,' I said. 'That end seems good. His side of the table's finished.'

'He did good,' Fat Mancho said. 'I seen lawyers weren't tossin' the case look more fucked up. You didn't know, you won't know. That kid's colder than a hit man.'

'John and Tommy are starting to smell something,' I said. 'They just don't know what.'

'A spic be livin' in the White House time it reaches their fuckin' brain,' Fat Mancho said.

'O'Co

'He was a good one,' Fat Mancho said. 'Then he lost a few and he found the bottle. Been chasin' nothin' but skid cases since.'

'He sobered up for this,' I said. 'He's got a shot at a win. Even without a witness.'

'He's a drunk, but he ain't a fool,' Fat Mancho said, putting the can of beer on the ground next to him. 'He wins this, every killer both sides of the river have his card in their pocket.'

'Is that true?' Carol asked, lifting one of the scarves up to where it covered everything but eyes.

'Is what true?' I said.

'Can we win the case without a witness?'

'You already won,' Fat Mancho said. 'You got the taste. Now, you're just lookin' to get away with it.'

'They've got to walk, Fat Man,' I said. 'We only win when John and Tommy walk.'

'Then you gotta get 'em outta the shootin' hole,' Fat Mancho said. 'Put 'em someplace else. Only your witness does that. And he's doin' a Claude Rains so far. Nobody's seen the fucker.'

'What if he doesn't show?' Carol said. 'What if we go in the way we are?'

'You got street justice,' Fat Mancho said. 'That's the real. You come up with empty hands on court justice, that's the bullshit.'

'They both take your life away, Fat Man,' I said. 'The street just does it faster.'

'Street's only one matters,' Fat Mancho said. 'Court's for uptown, people with suits, money, lawyers with three names. You got cash, you can buy court justice. On the street, justice got no price. She's blind where the judge sits. But she ain't blind out here. Out here, the bitch got eyes.'

'We need both,' I said.

'Then you need a witness,' Fat Mancho said, standing up, taking the black rubber ball out of his pants pocket. 'And I need to finish beatin' your ass. Let's go, loser. You down to me by four.'

'Can we finish this later?' I asked, too numb from the cold to stand.

'When later?' Fat Mancho asked, looking down at me.

'The middle of July,' I said.

SIXTEEN

Da

None of them had ever seen John Reilly or Tommy Marcano hold a gun.

The two waitresses on duty the night of the shooting testified that they knew both defendants and found them to be pleasant whenever they entered the pub. Neither remembered seeing John Reilly or Tommy Marcano the night Sean Nokes was killed. The women said they were in the kitchen at the time of the shooting and did not come out until the police arrived.

'Were the two shooters in the pub when the police got there?' O'Co

'No,' she said. 'I guess they already left.'

'Why do you guess that?'

'Killers don't wait for cops,' she said. 'In the neighborhood, nobody waits for cops.'

'You're from the neighborhood,' O'Co

'I was getting paid to wait,' she said.

Jerry the bartender testified he served the defendants two drinks and two beers on the afternoon of Nokes' death. They sat quietly and were gone in less than an hour. They paid tab and tip with a twenty left on the bar. He was in the back picking up his di

Through it all, Michael kept his cross-examinations simple, never venturing beyond where the witnesses wanted to go, never calling into dispute any parts of their accounts. He was always polite, cordial and relaxed, easily buying into the professed i

O'Co

To that end, Dr. George Paltrone, a Bronx general practitioner who also ran a detox clinic, was called to the stand as an expert witness. In Dr. Paltrone's opinion, if Mrs. Salinas drank as much alcohol as she claimed in the amount of time that she stated, her testimony had to be deemed less than credible.

'Are you saying Mrs. Salinas was drunk?' O'Co

'Not quite drunk,' Dr. Paltrone said. 'But she had more than enough drink in her to impair judgment.'

'Wouldn't witnessing a shooting sober her up?'

'Not necessarily,' Dr. Paltrone said. 'The fear she felt may have made a rational judgment even more difficult.'

'In other words, doctor, drink and fear don't always lead to truth?'

'That's right,' Dr. Paltrone said. 'More often than not they don't.'

I sat through the three days of O'Co

I had not seen Father Bobby since the night I asked him to take the stand. I thought it too risky to approach O'Co

But no one, not even King Be

'If he's not here tomorrow, then forget it,' I said to Carol as the third day ground to an end. 'It's over.'

'We could try to find somebody else,' Carol said. 'We still have some time.'

'Who?' I said. 'The Pope's in Rome and I don't know any rabbis.'

'We can go and talk to him again,' Carol said. 'Or maybe have somebody else talk to him.'

'He's not afraid of King Be

'Then we can force him to do it,' Carol said with a shrug and a half-smile. 'Put a gun on him.'

'You want your witness to have one hand raised in court,' I said. 'Not two.'