“Oh, crap,” Emma said.
“Is that any way to talk to a guy who brought you irises?”
“No, I meant, Oh, crap, I forgot to tell Gideon one thing.”
“So call him back.”
“Not tonight. He’s going out to unwind with his friends. I can tell him another time.”
“Tell him what?” Sherman said, maneuvering her toward the stairs.
“When I was cleaning out his desk, I found this red leather notebook wedged in behind the bottom drawer,” she said. “It’s not Gideon’s. I wondered if he knew anything about it.”
“Whose notebook is it?” Sherman asked as they headed upstairs.
“Enzo Salvi’s.”
Sherman stopped in the middle of the stairwell. “I knew that kid from back when I was teaching,” he said. “He was a total shit. You know who his father is, don’t you?”
“Of course I know,” Emma said. “Everyone in Howard Beach knows. We all went to Enzo’s funeral out of respect for the family.”
“Then do me a favor,” Sherman said. “Out of respect for me, don’t get involved. The kid is dead. He doesn’t need the notebook.”
“Well, maybe his mother might want it,” Emma said. “She lost a son. This is a connection.”
“It’s a connection all right. It’s a connection to us. I don’t want to be connected to the Salvi family. Emma, they’re Mafia. Regular people like you and me do not get involved with people like them.”
“So what should I do with the notebook?” she asked.
“Throw it in the trash with the rest of Gideon’s shit.”
“Okay,” she said, and scurried up the stairs toward the bedroom.
Sherman was right behind her.
Chapter 24
Gideon squinted at the mirror and slowly ran a brush through his dark, curly hair, looking for one of those rogue gray strands that had been popping up lately. Not a trace.
His brain wandered back to the woman with the sports bra and the FDNY baseball cap. “Timing is everything Andie,” he said, playing to his image in the mirror, “and yours just happened to suck.”
He left his apartment on West 84th and walked to the subway station at 86th and Broadway. He felt good about making his mother laugh. It’s the least he could do after killing her husband.
He caught the number 1 downtown train and found a seat.
Gideon blamed himself for his father’s death. Officially, it was an accident—one he was positive never would have happened if he had kept his promise. He was supposed to watch the Super Bowl on Dad’s new flat-screen, but two days before the game, he scored a pair of tickets on the forty-yard line, bailed out on his father, and flew down to Miami with Meredith.
It was the best weekend of his life—until his mother called him at halftime. After two beers, Roy decided to adjust the satellite dish on the roof. Maybe it had been four beers, maybe six. It didn’t matter—a broken neck is a broken neck, and everybody said it was just as well that the fall killed him because he’d have been a vegetable anyway.
Gideon was racked with guilt. He should have been the one up on that roof. He swore he’d do whatever he could to make it up to his mother. Finding Sherman Frye to buy the flower shop helped a lot. Sherman made his mother happy, and that made Gideon happy.
He got off the train at the Chambers Street station, headed up West Broadway, then turned right on Duane Street toward the hottest bar in lower Manhattan—maybe even the entire borough.
Two years ago, three middle-aged criminal lawyers decided they’d rather get people drunk than get them acquitted, so they opened a sprawling bar on Duane only two blocks from the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York.
They christened it Don’t Judge Me, and it quickly became the unofficial watering hole of the legal profession—a mecca for hordes of thirsty young attorneys—one of the few places in New York where you could say you were a lawyer and nobody would roll their eyes.
“Don’t judge me either,” Gideon said as he checked out his reflection in the frosted-glass window. The brass plaque on the front door read THE BAR NO LAWYER CAN PASS, and Gideon walked in.
The place was jammed, but Meredith must have had her eyes glued to the door because he heard her yell “Gid!” over the rest of the racket. She stood and waved, and he worked his way to the table where she was commiserating with the team of lawyers who had just lost the biggest case of their young careers.
Meredith, half-soused, completely devastated, but still beautiful, threw her arms around him. “I can’t believe we lost,” she said, not letting him go.