Recoil

“Bribery. Frank Pastor was involved in a real estate lawsuit. It wasn’t a criminal trial, it was a civil suit, but if he lost it he might be liable for fraud charges. And there was a lot of money involved in the case—hundreds of thousands of dollars.

“He wanted to buy the judge, to make sure he’d win the case.”

“Which side were you on? Whose lawyer were you?”

“Nobody’s. I wasn’t involved in the case.”

“You just said you used to be a lawyer, though.”

“I was trying another case in another courtroom in the same building. I went into the men’s room to wash some of the subway dirt off my hands and I happened to walk in just when Frank Pastor was slipping an envelope to the judge in the back of the men’s room. They didn’t realize I’d seen the envelope change hands.”

“How come?”

“They were around behind the row of stalls. I happened to see it in one of the mirrors over the washstands. It was an accident—a total coincidence. Things happen like that all the time but they’re always hard to believe when you try to explain them later.”

“They believed you, though, didn’t they? They must have, if Pastor went to jail.”

“It was my evidence that triggered the investigation, but they had a lot more to go on than just what I happened to see in the men’s room.”

“How come you knew who this guy Pastor was?”

“Everybody in New York knew him by sight in those days. You used to see him all the time on the television news, his picture in the magazines, all that kind of thing. He was a spokesman for some sort of antidefamation league and he was always in the public eye.”

“But if everybody knows these guys are gangsters, how come they’re not all in jail?”

He glanced at Jan. “Sometimes it’s very hard to get proof against them. They’re very clever people.”

“Doesn’t sound to me like this Pastor was so clever. He went to jail, right?”

Mathieson nodded. “I washed my hands and left the men’s room. I suppose they’d seen me by the time I left, or at least heard me, but neither one of them came out of the back of the room. I went right to the phone and called the District Attorney’s office. I had several friends there. I told them about the envelope I’d seen change hands in the men’s room. It could only have been one thing—a bribe. People don’t pass over harmless legitimate messages in secret like that. The District Attorney got a warrant from a criminal-court judge right away and they searched this judge’s chambers about two hours after I’d phoned. They found the envelope in the desk because he was in court all morning and hadn’t had time to get it away from his office.”

“What was in it, anyway? Money?”

“Seventy-five hundred dollars in cash. The envelope had both Pastor’s and the judge’s fingerprints on it.”

“Dumb,” Ro

“Well they didn’t expect anybody to find it, did they.”

“I still think it must’ve been pretty stupid for Pastor to do that in person. He could’ve had anybody deliver the money for him. Some flunky.”

“Normally he would have. But the judge insisted that Pastor pay him off in person. If anything went wrong—and something did—the judge wanted to be able to take Pastor down with him. He didn’t want Pastor double-crossing him afterward. You understand, Ro

“I think so. So they got caught. Did this judge fess up?”

“He might have, but as soon as he was released on bail he was killed. Shot to death on his own doorstep.”

Ro

Jan said, “It’s not a TV movie we’re talking about, Ro

Ro

“Yes. That’s why sometimes it’s so hard to get evidence against them—they make people afraid to testify.”

“But they didn’t scare you, did they.”

“They scared me.”

Jan said, “Your father stood up and testified to the truth in open court. A lot of people told him he was crazy.”

At the time, he was thinking, it seemed the right thing to do.

Ro

“Nobody could prove he’d ordered it done.”

They talked on. It was hard to explain to the boy; he’d grown up on adventure shows that always wrapped the villains up neatly in the fourth quarter-hour.

There was a discreet knock at the door—three raps, an interval, three more. Mathieson admitted Gle

Bradleigh crossed to the door. “No, we don’t want to talk to the world.” He shut it and locked it.

“Talk about what?”

Bradleigh tossed a large bulky manila envelope on the bed. “Morning, Jan. Ro

“Mr. Caruso brought it on a tray for us.”

“Caruso’s a treasure.” Bradleigh was snapping the latches of the suitcases. “We rescued as much of your clothes as we could from the house. One of the boys ran it through one of the dry cleaners yesterday. Had a lot of plaster dust but I think you’ll find most of them pretty clean now.”

Jan got up and rummaged through the suitcases. She beamed at Bradleigh. “We didn’t expect to see any of these again. Thanks so much …”

Bradleigh looked away. “Don’t thank me. Don’t ever thank me again for anything, all right?”

“Gle

Bradleigh wouldn’t look at any of them. “We dug quite a bit of other stuff out of the house. Odds and ends, you’ll want to sort through it—we’ve taken it to the FBI office downtown, you can claim the stuff later. Amazing the kind of things we found intact. A balsa-wood model airplane, believe it or not.”

She smiled; a sidewise glance at Ro

“I did not.”

Mathieson was looking at the manila envelope on the bed. “Who are we?”

“Mr. and Mrs. Jason W. Greene.” Bradleigh emptied the envelope’s contents onto the rumpled bed: documents of various shades and sizes. “Best we could do on short notice—we’d been putting these together for another family but they can wait. I’m afraid it’ll make you both out to be older than you are but it’s the closest we could do. The birth certificate on the boy is a flat-out forgery but we’re slipping a copy of it into the Binghamton hall of records if anybody ever checks back that far.”

“Binghamton?”

“Right. Because you spent some summers there, didn’t you?”

“Long time ago. With my uncle and aunt.”

“Then you knew the town a little, at least. We couldn’t give you a background you knew nothing about at all. Jason W. Greene. Margaret Johnson Greene. Don’t forget it.”

“What do I do for a living?”

“Your wife used to be a librarian. You were an investment counselor. All right?”

“That’d be hard to put over on anybody who knows anything about stocks and bonds.”

“You won’t ever have to practice the profession. It’s just part of the background, like last time. You came out here with a phony background as an insurance executive, remember? Letters of reference, testimonials, the works. It’s all in that pile of papers. Read through it, familiarize yourselves with all of it. Memorize what you have to.”

“What’s our program?”

“Like last time. Whatever suits you—whatever you folks think you can handle. We’ll grease wheels to help you get started. After that it’s up to you. If you start a business and it goes bust that’s your own problem. We’ll help with the relocation costs but we can’t bankroll you beyond a few hundred a month for seed money. It’d be against policy and anyway we haven’t got the funds.”

Mathieson pawed through the documents on the bed. “Massachusetts driver’s license. I don’t know the first thing about Massachusetts.”