Bitter Truth Read online

  WILLIAM

  LASHNER

  BITTER

  TRUTH

  (Originally published as Veritas)

  In memory of my father and partner,

  Melvin Lashner,

  who knew right from wrong

  and lived each day as if it mattered.

  A taste for truth at any cost

  is a passion which spares nothing.

  —ALBERT CAMUS

  Contents

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Part 1 AILUROPHOBIA

  Chapters

  1 I suppose every hundred million dollars has its own sordid…

  2 It started for me with a routine job in the…

  3 “Put the gun away,” I said in my sharpest voice.

  4 “Where are we off to?” asked Beth, sitting in the…

  5 Driving back into town on the Schuylkill Expressway I wasn’t…

  6 Peter Cressi had a dark, Elvisine look that just sort…

  7 “It’s the Asian Radish that makes this dish truly memorable,”…

  8 I sat down at the bar of the Irish Pub…

  9 He first saw her at a place on Sixteenth Street,…

  10 I slipped my Mazda into a spot on the side…

  11 “They just went in,” said Ellie, her hands fluttering about…

  12 When I had told Gaylord I took a keen professional…

  13 I cleared off my desk before she came, threw out…

  14 “About how many conversations did you have with the defendant…

  Part 2 FROGS

  15 Last night I dreamt I went to Veritas again. I…

  16 Last night I dreamt I went to Veritas again. I…

  17 I was lying in bed in a dark cell of…

  18 Breakfast was waiting in tarnished silver chafing dishes arrayed on…

  19 It was a touching little service for Jimmy Vigs at…

  20 “I thought it best if I paid my respects from…

  21 The cry of metal being torn apart. A shriek of…

  22 Cressi and Andy Bandy drove me home and waited for…

  23 The Shriek of skidding tires sliced through the dark stillness…

  24 I spent much of the next morning inside my office,…

  25 Everett lugged me through the apartment and spun me into…

  26 I paid the four bits, folded the tabloid in half…

  27 “How’s that grouper, Caroline?” asked Franklin Harrington, with a surfeit…

  28 Her place was above an abandoned hardware store on Market…

  29 The vast stretch of lawn within the iron gates of…

  Part 3 FAITH

  30 What had been merely rumors of dark doings in the…

  31 Morris Kapustin was sitting at my dining room table with…

  32 With Caroline sitting on my couch, smoking, her legs crossed,…

  33 Three new young men came for tea today, bringing to…

  34 I was sitting at my desk, staring at the message…

  35 The Edward Shaws lived in a townhouse on Delancey Place,…

  36 I waited in my car outside the large shambling house…

  37 When I came home from the Haven, Caroline was waiting…

  38 “I’ve been touched by it too,” said Beth.

  39 There was no Dr. Karpas listed in the Philadelphia white…

  40 When I got to the Ralph R. Rizzo Sr. Ice Skating Rink…

  41 I didn’t rush right from the lunch with McDeiss to…

  42 I found myself alone in a massive, high-ceilinged room that…

  Part 4 DEAD MEN RAINING

  43 San Ignacio is a beat old frontier town, the capital…

  44 The old ledgers were spread out on our conference room…

  45 After Rabbinowitz left for the hospital to visit his good…

  46 I hid my car in a grove of bushes outside…

  47 I stuffed the photographs back into the box and the…

  48 I wanted to talk on the drive home, I was…

  49 “Calvi,” I said.

  50 “What the hell is happening? asked a frantic Caroline as”…

  51 The Philadelphia Naval Shipyard rises rusted and desolate on the…

  52 It was Anton Schmidt, rising to his knees, still holding…

  53 “PSSSST.”

  54 By the time you read this I will be dead.

  Part 5 ORCHIDS

  55 We put into the Macal River from a dirt landing…

  56 “It’s the fungus in the air that does it,” says…

  57 Canek is paddling me back down the river, toward San…

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  By William Lashner

  Praise

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Part 1

  Ailurophobia

  I know of nothing more despicable and pathetic than a man who devotes all the hours of the waking day to the making of money for money’s sake.

  —JOHN D. ROCKEFELLER

  1

  En Route to Belize City, Belize

  I SUPPOSE EVERY HUNDRED million dollars has its own sordid story and the hundred million I am chasing is no exception.

  I am on a TACA International flight to Belize in search of my fortune. Underneath the seat in front of me lies my briefcase and in my briefcase lies all I need, officially, to pick my fortune up and take it home with me. I lift the briefcase onto my lap and open it, carefully pulling out the file folder, and from that folder, with even more care, pulling out the document inside. I like the feel of the smooth copy paper in my hands. I read it covetously, holding it so the nun sitting next to me can’t steal a peek. Its text is as short and as evocative as the purest haiku. “Default judgment is awarded in favor of the plaintiff in the amount of one hundred million dollars.” The document is signed by the judge and stamped in red ink and certified by the Prothonotary of the Court of Common Pleas of the City of Philadelphia and legal in every state of the union and those countries with the appropriate treaties with the United States, a group in which, fortunately, Belize is included. One hundred million dollars, the price of two lives plus punitive damages. I bring the paper to my nose and smell it. I can detect the sweet scent of mint, no, not peppermint, government. One hundred million dollars, of which my fee, as the attorney, is a third.

  Think hard on that for a moment; I do, constantly. If I find what I’m hunting it would be like winning the lotto every month for a year. It would be like Ed McMahon coming to my door with his grand prize check not once, not twice, but three times, and I would get it all at once instead of over thirty years. It would be enough money to run for president if I were ever so deranged. Well, maybe not that much, but it is still a hell of a lot of money. And I want it, desperately, passionately, with all my heart and soul. Those who whine that there is no meaning left in American life are blind, for there is fame and there is fortune and, frankly, you can take fame and cram it down your throats. Me, I’ll take the money.

  For almost a year I’ve been in search of the assets against which my default judgment will be collected. I’ve traced them through the Cayman Islands to a bank in Luxembourg to a bank in Switzerland, through Liberia and Beirut and back through the Cayman Islands, from where payments had been wired, repeatedly, to an account at the Belize Bank. From the Belize Bank the funds were immediately withdrawn, in cash. Unlike all the other transfers of funds, the transfers to Belize were neither hidden within the entwining vines of larger transactions nor mathematically encrypted. The owner of the money has grown complacent in his overconfidence or he is sending me an invitation and either way I am heading to Belize, flying down to follow the money until it leads me directly to him. He is a vicious man, violent, deceptive, greedy beyond belief. He h
as killed without the least hesitation, killed for the basest of reasons. His hands drip with blood and I have no grounds to believe he will not kill again. When I think on his crimes I find it amazing how the possibility of so much money can twist one to act beyond all rationality. I am flying down to Belize to find this man in his tropical asylum so I can serve the judgment personally and start the collection proceedings that will at long last make me rich.

  In a voice equally apathetic in Spanish and English we are told that we are beginning our approach to Belize City. I return the document to the briefcase, twist the case’s lock, stow it back beneath the seat in front of me. Outside the window I see the teal blue of the Caribbean and then a ragged line of scabrous slicks of land, spread atop the water like foul oil, and then the jungle, green and thick and foreign. Clots of treetops are spotted dark by clouds. For not the first time I feel a doubt rise about my mission. If I were going to Pittsburgh or Bern or Luxembourg City I’d feel more confident, but Belize is a wild, untamed place, a country of hurricanes and rain forests and great Mayan ruins. Anything can happen in Belize.

  The nun sitting next to me, habited in white with a black veil and canvas sneakers, puts down her Danielle Steel and smiles reassuringly.

  “Have you been to our country before?” she asks with a British accent.

  “No,” I say.

  “It is quite beautiful,” she says. “The people are wonderful.” She winks. “Keep a hand on your wallet in Belize City, yes? But you will love it, I’m sure. Business or pleasure?”

  “Business.”

  “Of course, I could tell by your suit. It’s a bit hot for that. You’ll be visiting the barrier reef too, I suppose, they all do, but there’s more to Belize than fish. While you are here you must see our rain forests. They are glorious. And the rivers too. You brought insect repellent, I expect.”

  “I didn’t, actually. The bugs are bad?”

  “Oh my, yes. The mosquito, well, you know, I’m sure, of the mosquito. The malaria pills they have now work wonders. And the welts from the botlass fly last for days but are not really harmful. Ticks of course and scorpions, but the worst is the beefworm. It is the larva of the botfly and it is carried by the mosquito. It comes in with the bite and lives within your flesh while it grows, grabbing hold of your skin with pincers and burrowing in. Nasty little parasite, that. The whole area blows up and is quite painful, there is a burning sensation, but you mustn’t pull it, oh no. Then you will definitely get an infection. Instead you must cover the area with glue and tape and suffocate it. The worm squirms underneath for awhile before it dies and that is considered painful by some, but the next morning you can just squeeze the carcass out like toothpaste from a tube.”

  I am lost in the possibilities when the plane tilts up, passes low over a wide jungle river, and slams into the runway. “Welcome to the Philip Goldson International Airport,” says the voice over the intercom. “The airport temperature is ninety-three and humidity is eighty-five percent. Enjoy your stay in Belize.”

  We depart onto the tarmac. It is oppressively hot, the Central American sun is brutal. I feel its pressure all over my body. The air is tropically thick and in its humidity my suit jacket immediately weighs down with sweat. There is something on my face. I am confused for a moment before I realize it is an insect and frantically swipe it away. We are herded in a line toward customs. To our left is the terminal building, brown as rust, a relic from the fifties, to our right is a camouflaged military transport, being loaded with something large I can’t identify. A black helicopter circles overhead. Soldiers rush by in a jeep. Sweat drips from my temples and down my neck. I shuck off my jacket, but already my shirt is soaked. I brush a mosquito from my wrist but not before it bites me. I can almost feel something wiggling beneath the skin.

  After we hand our passports over for inspection and pick up our bags we are sent in lines to wait for the dog. I sit on my suitcase and pick at the amoebic blob swelling on my wrist. A German shepherd appears, mangy and fierce. He is straining at his leash. He sniffs first one suitcase, then another, then a backpack. The dog comes up to me and shoves his nose into my crotch. Two policemen laugh.

  Even inside the terminal it is hot and the sunlight rushing through the windows is fierce and I feel something dangerous beyond the mosquitoes in the swelter about me. I wonder what the hell I am doing in Belize but then I feel the weight of my briefcase in my hand and remember about the hundred million dollars and its story, a story of betrayal and revenge, of intrigue and sex and revelation, a story of murder and a story of redemption and a story of money most of all. Suddenly I know exactly what I am doing here and why.

  2

  IT STARTED FOR ME with a routine job in the saddest little room in all of Philadelphia. Crowded with cops and shirt-sleeved lawyers and court clerks and boxes of files, a dusty clothes rack, a computer monitor with plastic wood trim and vacuum tubes like something out of Popular Mechanics circa 1954, it was a room heavy with the air of an exhausted bureaucracy. I was sitting alone on the lawyers’ bench inside that room, waiting for them to drag my client from the holding cells in the basement. My job that morning was to get him out on a reasonable bail and, considering what he was being charged with, that wasn’t going to be easy.

  I was in the Roundhouse, Philadelphia Police Headquarters, a circular building constructed in the sixties, all flowing lines, every office a corner office, an architectural marvel bright with egalitarian promise. But the Roundhouse had turned old before its time, worn down by too much misery, too much crime. At the grand entrance on Race Street there was a statue of a cop holding a young boy aloft in his arms, a promise of all the good works envisioned to flow through those doors, except that the entrance on Race Street was now barred and visitors were required to enter through the rear. In through that back entrance, to the right, past the gun permit window, past the bail clerk, through the battered brown doors and up the steps to the benches where a weary public could watch, through a wall of thick Plexiglas, the goings on in the Roundhouse’s very own Municipal Court.

  “Sit down, ma’am,” shouted the bailiff to a young woman who had walked through those doors and was now standing among the benches behind the Plexiglas wall. She was young, thin, a waif with short hair bleached yellow and a black leather jacket. She was either family or friend of one of the defendants, or maybe just whiling away her day, looking for a morning’s entertainment. If so, it was bound to be a bit wan. “You can’t stand in the back,” shouted the bailiff, “you have to sit down,” and so she sat.

  The defendants were brought into the room in batches of twenty, linked wrist to wrist by steel, and placed in a holding cell, with its own Plexiglas view. You could see them in there, through the Plexiglas, waiting with sullen expectation for their brief time before the bar.

  “Sit down, sir,” called out the bailiff in what was a steady refrain. “You can’t stand back there,” and another onlooker dropped onto one of the benches.

  “Hakeem Trell,” announced the clerk and a young man sauntered a few steps to the large table before the bench that dominated the room.

  “Hakeem Trell,” said Bail Commissioner Pauling, reading from his file, “also known as Roger Pettibone, also known as Skip Dong.” At this last alias Commissioner Pauling looked over the frames of his half-glasses at the young man standing arrogantly before him. There was about Hakeem Trell a.k.a. Roger Pettibone a.k.a. Skip Dong the defiant annoyance of a high school student facing nothing more serious than an afternoon’s detention. Where was the anxiety as he faced imprisonment, the trembling fear at the rent in his future? What had we done to these children? My client wasn’t in the batch they had just brought up and so I was forced to sit impatiently as Commissioner Pauling preliminarily arraigned Hakeem Trell and then Luis Rodriguez and then Anthony O’Neill and then Jason Lawton and then and then and then, one after another, young kids almost all, mainly minority, primarily poor, or at least dressing that way, all taking it in with a practiced air of
hostility. Spend enough time in the Roundhouse’s Municipal Court and you begin to feel what it is to be an occupying power.

  “Sirs, please sit down, you can’t stand back there,” shouted the bailiff and two men in the gallery arranged themselves on one of the forward benches, sitting right in front of the young blonde woman, who shifted to a different bench to maintain her view of the proceedings.

  I recognized both of the men. I had been expecting them to show, or at least some men like them. One was huge, wearing a shiny warm-up suit, his face permanently cast with the heavy lidded expression of a weightlifter contemplating a difficult squat thrust. I had seen him around, he had grunted at me once. The other was short, thin, looking like a talent scout for a cemetery. He had the face and oily gray hair of a mortician, wearing the same black suit a mortician might wear, clutching a neat little briefcase in his lap. This slick’s name was Earl Dante, a minor mob figure I had met a time or two before. His base of operations was a pawnshop, neatly named the Seventh Circle Pawn, on Two Street, south of Washington, just beyond the Mummers Museum, where he made his piranha loans at three points a week and sent out his gap-toothed collectors to muscle in his payments. Dante nodded at me and I contracted the sides of my mouth into an imitation of a smile, hoping no one noticed, before turning back to the goings on in the court.

  Commissioner Pauling was staring at me. His gaze drifted up to alight on the mortiferous face of Earl Dante before returning back to my own. I gave a little shrug. The clerk called the next name on his sheet.

  In the break between batches, Commissioner Pauling strolled off to what constituted his chambers in the Roundhouse, no desk of course, or bookshelves filled with West reporters, but a hook for his robe and a sink and an industrial-sized roll of paper to keep his chamberpot clean. I stepped up to the impeccably dressed clerk still at the bench.

  “Nice tie, Henry,” I said.

  “I can’t say the same for yours, Mr. Carl,” said Henry, shuffling through his files, not deigning to even check out my outfit. “But then I guess you don’t got much selection when you buying ties at Woolworth’s.”