Personal injuries kc-5 Page 10

  There were no prizewinners for the worst disease, Bobbie had told Evon. He knew this from his practice. The body could fall apart in gruesome ways not even envisioned in nightmares. But this one, `this rotten motherfucker of a disease,' as he repeatedly called it, was perhaps the most insidious. Your body deserted you. The voluntary muscles weakened, spasmed painfully, and then stopped working at all. Even the minutest volitional reflexes eventually disappeared, blinking usually being the last to go, rendering a patient entirely inert. In the meantime, intellectual functions remained unimpaired. Rainey thought. She saw. And worst of all, Robbie said, she felt. Inside and out. Movement ended with ALS. But not pain. She suffered intensely and could not writhe or lift her hand far enough to massage the muscles knotted in misery.

  The Feavers had tried every potential remedy-herbalists and homeopaths and acupuncture. They'd volunteered for experimental drugs and had been accepted for one trial, a medicine that after ninety days left Rainey on the same steady downward slide. They had even gone to see a woman with a ridiculous machine made up of old vacuum tubes and a long flashing neon wand that she waved over Rainey's torso while making a 'woo-woo' noise with her mouth. The scene, Robbie said, would have been worth a laugh, had they not been so humiliated faced with the unreasoning depths of their desperation.

  The Feavers' bedroom, where Robbie still slept, was full of contraptions. Evon crept to the threshold, but went no farther inasmuch as Rainey was in the bathroom. In her absence, Robbie toured the room, pointing out various machines he'd previously described. There was something called a Hoyer lift that brought Lorraine, when she had the energy, from the large hospital bed to her wheelchair, An adjustable tray table held a speakerphone, the Easy Writeran appliance to hold a pencil-a mechanical page turner for reading, and two remote controls for the huge theater-style TV A glowing computer monitor sat beside the bed, along with an alphabet board on which Rainey pointed out letters when she became frustrated by her efforts to speak.

  All of this, of course, had cost-monumentally. Including the caregivers' fees, the figure she'd heard Robbie repeat was more than $2 million. He would soon blow through the lifetime cap on his insurance and already had a suit pending against the company for several hundred thousand dollars in covered expenses they'd refused to pay. But in a situation with few blessings, money was one. He had money, buckets of money, a hundred times the resources of most families, whom this disease routinely brought to the verge of bankruptcy. In their case, Mort had told Evon once, Rainey simply would not live long enough for Robbie to spend everything.

  The process of retrieving Lorraine from the bathroom was under way. Evon retreated while Robbie assisted the aide, a tiny Filipina named Elba. Down the hall, Evon heard them encouraging Rainey as she was restored to the chair and wheeled back.

  The night before, a Sunday, Robbie had gone to a wedding. Rainey had been too fatigued to go, but having promised to take his mother, Robbie attended, ferrying the old woman back and forth from the nursing home where she lived. Rainey slept in snatches between bouts of muscle cramps and had apparently missed his return last night as well as his departure this morning. Robbie described the evening's doings now.

  "Mother of all Jewish weddings. Right down to the sculpted chopped liver. Great food, bad wine. And even so, my Uncle Harry was drunk like always and got so sick he didn't notice that he'd flushed his false teeth down the john."

  Much more softly, Rainey answered. Her faint mumbling speech, a wobbly ghoulish drone with a glottal hiccup at the end of every word, was growing worse every day. For this, too, Robbie envisioned mechanical aid, a computer controlled voice simulator that could be operated so long as Rainey had any voluntary movement remaining, even flexing her brow. Evon had heard Robbie's discussions with his wife's former colleagues in the computer industry who were helping. The hardware had been purchased and stored somewhere in the house, but the Feavers held out against each of these changes as long as possible, since no matter how convenient they were, there was no way to avoid the emotional impact of the lengthening shadow of decline.

  "To the nines," he answered now. "Everybody. Inez bought a three-thousand-dollar dress-where she gets three thousand for a dress is beyond me-and as soon as she walks in, there's Susan Schultz in the same thing. Then my Aunt Myrna shows up in this tight white number, a lady of what? Sixty? And through the fabric and her panty hose you can see the outline of the tattoo on her fanny. You don't pick your family, right? I took my ma out on the dance floor in her wheelchair and whirled her around a few times. She got a real bang out of it."

  Evon heard Rainey's voice again.

  "I wish you'd been there, too," he said more somberly.

  He refused to linger on the downbeat. Whatever his private moods, with Lorraine, Robbie was determined to be the spirit of brave optimism. On the phone, Evon had often heard him counterpoint his wife's reports of deterioration by reminding her of some other physical element that seemed to be withstanding the physicians' dire predictions. Frequently, he'd turned to the computer in his office to tap out a message to her, especially when he'd heard a good joke. "E-mail," he explained to Evon, an innovation to which Lorraine had introduced him. Now his tone ascended cheerily as he announced Evon. She girded herself.

  A blast of air freshener could not fully conceal the many odors that shrank the large room-excretory smells, liniments and lotions, cramped body scents, the greasy effluvium of machines. As Evon entered, Robbie was massaging Rainey's arm to alleviate a spasm. She was in her wheelchair, the HiRider, a huge impressive motor-driven affair, with elaborate padding and smaller wheels. Robbie had described the chair. It not only moved smoothly in every direction from a joystick control but rose to a standing position, so that once she was strapped in, Lorraine could even greet guests at the door. Tonight she simply sat, held upright by two belts across her waist and chest. She wore a high-fashion running suit, on which the zippers had been replaced with Velcro. From the corner of her mouth a crooked tube protruded, attached to a bottle of distilled water on an IV standard, which provided a steady drip to replace her saliva.

  Even behind this obstruction, Rainey Feaver's beauty had not fully deserted her, although she looked decades older than the woman in the photo behind Robbie's desk. The muscle waste had emaciated her, and left her head canted slightly to the left, but she apparently asked her attendant for makeup every day and her dark hair retained its luster. Somewhat caved in, her face was still striking. The remarkable violet eyes of the photograph remained vivid and fully focused on Evon as she approached.

  Hopelessly ill at ease, Evon did her best: She'd heard so much about Rainey. Robbie was proud of her courage.

  Lorraine considered that and slowly worked her mouth around several words. Her lips had lost most of their elasticity and barely responded. Rough to be you? It made no sense, and Evon had to turn to Robbie for help.

  "Lovely to meet you," Robbie translated. He explained that certain letters had grown impossible-'I's especially. He smiled at his wife and touched her hand. "She always called herself a JAP."

  "Rame joke," Rainey said with protracted effort. Evon laughed with Elba and Robbie, but despite all warnings, Lorraine's acuity was jolting, a dismal register of the vast inventory of thoughts and feelings even now going unvoiced. The laughter, which had rippled through Rainey like a light current, led to a spell of coughing. This reflex, too, was weakened, and in order to clear Lorraine's air passages, little Elba bolstered Rainey and applied a cupped hand repeatedly against her back, speaking sweetly in her sharply accented voice.

  When Lorraine recovered, she resumed where she had left off. The interruption was unnoted. Life was what could be grasped in the intervals. She asked Evon about work. How long? Where from? She mustered only two-word questions. Robbie hovered over the chair and mediated. Even this woman in extremis Evon answered in her undercover identity. Robbie, who had shared nothing of his own situation with Rainey, would have wanted nothing else.

  "Whah
rif?" asked Rainey. "N'by?" She was asking if Evon lived nearby, apparently curious about why Evon was here in the dwindling hours of the afternoon. Robbie explained their meeting with Sarah Perlan and said that he was going to have to drive Evon back to her place. Something struck him as he spoke, a wayward implication in the detail, and Rainey responded at once to his apparent anxiety. In the faltering moment in which Robbie vamped to cover, explaining that Evon was new to town and still without a car, a different air came into the room. Rainey Feaver had heard her share of tales from her husband, especially regarding other women, and she clearly knew she was hearing one now. Her narrow, long jawed face could show little in the way of expression, but even at that, her eyelids fluttered in a labored way and her lovely eyes grew darker.

  "Co' heah," she told Evon. Evon pitched a look at Bobbie, but his doting manner with his wife apparently comprehended no way to deny her. He let Evon take his place beside the chair. She bent closer because she could not hear when Rainey first spoke.

  "He rise." It took a moment. Great, Evon thought when she understood. Perfect for the government witness. A testimonial to his dishonesty from the person who knew him best. Rainey, after a moment of recovery, had more.

  "He rise a-bow everfing," she said. "Remember'."

  Evon suddenly understood that she was receiving a warning- vengeful in Dart. but also perhaps shared in a sisterly spirit. Robbie was not to be believed. If he said he cared, pay no attention. If he said he'd marry her when Lorraine was gone, it was only another lie. Rainey's eyes bore in as her message fired home. Robbie intervened to save Evon.

  "She already knows that, sweetie. Everybody who hangs around me for a while knows that." Back beside the chair, Robbie was alone in smiling at his joke. "It'll just take her a few years to see my good side."

  "Yes," said Rainey. Years, she meant and went on deliberately in her watery monotone. "Then I be dea'. And you be happy."

  Robbie took quite a while with that. His tongue was laid inside his cheek. He gave her a look, a dignified request: Don't talk that way. But he said nothing. He bent to adjust Rainey's legs on pieces of foam cut to cushion them, and, still without a word, turned to take Evon back to the city.

  In the car, after some time, he said, "They say things. PALS? People with ALS. It's part of the disease. Because of the neurons that get affected in the brain stem. They lose impulse control. It's actually funny in a way. You know, ironic. Lorraine was always one of these people who couldn't say anything. It just built up. She burned holes in my suits. She threw my Cubans down the toilet. She once put cayenne pepper in my jockstrap. You can imagine what that was about." A brief smile flickered up in admiration of his wife's spunk. "But she couldn't say what was on her mind. Now? Criminy. God, what I've heard."

  Facing him, Evon had no idea what to say. Her sense of the size of what was bearing down on Rainey and Robbie was still gathering. The whole episode had left her heart feeling as if it wanted to scurry around her chest.

  The car slid to the curb beside the brown awning extending from her building. Pedestrians rushed beneath it along the refurbished brick walks in their hats and heavy coats, eager to reach the warmth of their homes. She still knew none of her neighbors. There was an insular mood to the area. Despite extensive renovation and renewal, bums and addicts could often be found in the mornings, asleep in the sandblasted doorways or beside the struggling saplings in their fancy wooden planter boxes. Local residents were in the habit of moving on with their business without greeting anyone.

  She reached for the door handle, then looked Feaver's way. Somehow, after all her ungainliness, she managed something in her expression. In response, a hundred emotions seemed to swim through his face.

  "You know what a Yahrzeit candle is?" he asked her then. She didn't. "It's what Jews do to commemorate a death in the family. Mother. Brother. Every year, you light this candle. On the anniversary. And it's the saddest goddamn thing. This candle burns for twenty-four hours in like a water glass, and even if you get up in the middle of the night, the thing is flickering, the only light in the house. My ma always lit one for her sister. And right before her stroke, I was there, you know, I go see her early in the morning, it was still dark, and I looked at this thing, sitting on the stove, this forlorn kind of light, spurting and wavering, charring the sides of the glass and getting lower all the time, and I suddenly said to myself, That's Rainey. That's what she is now, just a long sad candle melting, burning down to this soft puddle of stuff which will finally drown the light. That's Rainey."

  He'd drooped against the wooden steering wheel. She waited what seemed to be forever, but he never looked her way. Instead she left the car and watched as he zoomed from the curb and executed a smooth U-turn despite the heavy traffic, speeding back toward home.

  CHAPTER 12

  UCORC'S protocols aimed at avoiding trials in the contrived cases. A full courtroom showdown with witnesses for two sides would require both the manpower and the budget of a Hollywood production and would greatly enhance the risks of detection. Plan A was that Bobbie would either win a motion that disposed of a whole case, or prevail on some other significant ruling, then declare the matter favorably settled and make a payoff. Thus, Judge Malatesta's denial of McManis's motion to dismiss set the stage for Robbie to make his first recorded drop, this one to Walter Wunsch. With that, the Project would move beyond what the agents called `talking dirty' to real criminality. Assuming no foul-ups, Walter would become the first trophy, the fast dead-bang conviction, and the first person to squeeze when Stan began the ultimate castle siege meant to bring down Brendan Tuohey.

  About two weeks after the session in Malatesta's courtroom, Robbie phoned Walter, imparting the good news that the judge's ruling had forced McManis to settle Petros v. Standard Railing and arranging the drop at their customary site, the parking garage adjoining the Temple. That afternoon, Klecker arrived at McManis's with another of his clever devices, a portable video camera with a fiber-optic lens that fit into the hinge of a dummy briefcase matching Robbie's. McManis looked it over, then quickly vetoed its use.

  "Robbie's never passed money before wearing hardware. It's tough enough to keep up the cover without worrying about aiming and focusing. We'll use the camera later."

  "Jim," argued Sennett, in obvious distress, "Jim, a jury will want to see the money change hands. If it's only audio and Robbie can't get Walter to say something about the dough, this whole thing won't be worth much."

  Jim would not budge. He rarely asserted the authority that UCORC had given him over operational details. In theory, Stan determined what evidence was needed, and Jim made the tactical decisions about how to obtain it, but usually Jim let Stan have his way. The best Stan could manage now was cool courtesy to hide the fact he was bridling.

  Instead, the discussion turned to how Robbie could make an overt reference to the money, something which this dark world's strict etiquette severely discouraged. Feaver came up with the idea of delivering $15,000 to Walter, instead of the usual ten. The rationale for this largesse was found, oddly, in a problem that had been irritating Sennett for several days.

  By now Sennett had ground out six more fictitious complaints. To Stan and McManis's amazement and chagrin, half of the new cases had been drawn to Malatesta, while none went to Barnett Skolnick. Sennett was especially eager to get to Skolnick, the one judge who dealt with Feaver without a bagman, but Robbie had no reason to complain about the assignments. His only interest was supposed to be having the case before a judge he could `talk to.' However, with three specials recently added to Malatesta's calendar, Feaver had need to be particularly ingratiating, and the additional sum would provide an excuse to address the amount of money Robbie was bringing Walter.

  But this left the agents five thousand dollars short. With some anguish, McManis wrote a check to cash on the Law Offices' account, knowing it would require hours of paperwork for D.C., only to find the bank downstairs closed when he arrived. Ultimately Sennett had to make a
series of calls. The United States Attorney returned half an hour later and drew five thousand dollars in cash from an envelope in his topcoat. He'd requisitioned the funds with his own IOU from the Drug Enforcement Administration, which kept tens of thousands of dollars in currency on hand as `buy money.'

  Every bill was then photocopied so it could be identified if it turned up in a search. The stack of almost two hundred bills, mostly hundreds and fifties with a sprinkling of twenties, was nearly an inch thick, even banded. Accordingly, Robbie's habit with Walter was to deliver the cash in a cigarette carton. Wunsch was a heavy smoker, one of those nicotine fugitives regularly pacing back and forth before the Temple, coatless no matter what the weather and looking as if he was attempting to suck the cigarette dry in his race to get back to the courtroom before the judge returned to the bench.

  Finally, Robbie was wired. He let his trousers down this time without much forethought. Afterwards, Robbie grabbed the cigarette carton with the money and Evon also put on her coat. She would be in the car while Robbie and Walter met. It would be far too unsettling to Wunsch if Feaver handed over the money in front of her, but the need to overcome standard courtroom defenses meant she had to catch sight of Wunsch to confirm it was his voice on the recording. She also had to watch Robbie so she could testify at trial that he'd had no opportunity to keep the money himself. To corroborate the drop, McManis would frisk Feaver carefully as soon as he returned.

  "Now you have the scenario?" Sennett asked, reminding Robbie yet again to talk about the money. "And see if you can find out what the hell Malatesta does with all this cash. The Service," he said, meaning the IRS, "can't see anything "

  That remark appeared to prick McManis, who looked up abruptly. Inter-agency rivalries are fierce, and Jim apparently knew little about the IRS's continuing participation in the investigation, although he must have anticipated as much. In a world where catching bad guys gives life meaning, the IRS agents who'd knocked on Robbie's door would never settle for being entirely cut out of the case. Nevertheless, knowing Sennett, I suspected Stan was putting Jim in his place, reminding him who still held the most secrets in the game of need-to-know.