Little Deaths(90)

Through his teeth, “Jesus Christ. This fucking job . . .”

He balled up his cup and flung it away from him. Stared at the ground for a moment, and then turned back.

“There’s a guy I know—he was an actor for a while. He needs money. He’ll do it.”

“How do you know him? Do you trust him?”

“He’s . . . he was my wife’s nephew. Bad apple.”

He shook his head, blew out his cheeks.

“This is gonna cost you. You know that.”

Pete pushed away thoughts of his mother. Focused on the check she’d sent him for his future.

“I got money.”

Horowitz looked at him a while.

“I can’t believe this. You sure you want to do this?”

“I have to do it. I have to help her.”

Horowitz shook his head slowly.

“You poor bastard.”

Then he sighed.

“How do you even know she’s innocent?”

Pete forced himself to meet Horowitz’s eyes.

“I don’t.”

Horowitz opened his mouth but Pete rushed on.

“I think she is. I hope she is. But she’s . . . I don’t want her to go to prison.”

And then he looked down so he didn’t have to see what was in the other man’s face.

“Jesus, Wonicke. I hope you know what the fuck you’re doing.”

There was a long pause, and then Horowitz said, “Take it from me, you do this, there’s no coming back from it. You won’t be the same person you are now. Lies change everything.”

He looked at Pete for a long moment.

“But I guess you’ve already changed.”

There was a strained silence.

Then Horowitz said, “One more thing. I covered a lot of trials. Juries are unpredictable. You do this, and you might still lose. You told me that Charlie Devlin’s spent his time on the stand making Mrs. Malone into the Whore of Babylon. The drinking. The makeup. The men.”

“And?”

“Just think about it, is all I’m saying. You do this, you put everything you have, everything you are, on the line—you’re still up against a bunch of people who think it’s their God-given duty to do the right thing. They’ve had hours of Devlin making her out to be a woman with no morals, and now hours of this Mrs. Gobek telling them that she practically saw Mrs. Malone do it. You really think they’ll believe the right thing to do is let the bad lady walk?”

Pete hated him. He fucking hated him for saying this.

“They won’t have a choice. The evidence.”

“Yeah, yeah, the evidence. It’s not all about evidence and witness statements. Just think about it.”

But there wasn’t time to think about it. Ruth needed him.

Pete took down the phone number Horowitz gave him. He made a couple of calls. And on Monday morning, Scott called a new witness to the stand.


Ruth sat with her head propped on one hand, letting the words of the men around her wash over her. She looked at the photographs of Frankie and Cindy pinned to the board, remembered Dr. Dunn standing in front of them, giving his evidence.

She glanced over at Frank and saw that he was staring at the photographs too. To everyone else in the room, her children were merely bodies. Their skin and teeth, their clothes, the very strands of their hair and the contents of their stomachs—these were just props used to make a point.

But once upon a time, they had been her babies. Their babies. No matter how bad things had gotten between them, she and Frank had that together, at least.

She looked up at those gap-toothed smiles and longed to feel their softness, their wriggling warmth, just one more time. She saw them playing in the park as they had on that last day. They had bickered and giggled and shrieked, had eaten cereal and oranges and meatball subs. They had dropped crumbs and peel and stained their shirts and skin.

And now all of those memories had been reduced to cold specimen dishes, to typed reports, to flat testimonies of long words. To this room.

She closed her eyes, pushing out those thoughts of the courtroom. She didn’t want these to become her last memories associated with the children.


Pete watched the tall figure amble toward the witness stand, take his seat, swear the oath. He swallowed down his nausea, focused.

“Please state your name for the record.”

“Clyde Harrison.”

“Mr. Harrison, please tell the court where you were on the night of July thirteenth, nineteen sixty-five.”

“I was in Queens. I was staying in the apartment of a friend on 72nd Road, just off Main Street. With my wife and our kids.”

He nodded toward a woman with short auburn hair sitting in the second row of the public benches. She blushed prettily.

“How old were your children at the time?”

“Well . . . Robert would have been just five—his birthday is in April. And Mary would have turned three in March.”

Harrison’s slick blond hair shone under the bright lights of the courtroom, and he grinned affably at Scott. It was the same way he’d smiled at Pete when they’d met in Kissena Park two days earlier. The same smile he’d given when Pete had handed over a thousand bucks of his father’s insurance money in twenty-dollar bills.

“What were you doing at your friend’s apartment that night, Mr. Harrison?”