As she zipped her purse, Diane caught sight of a familiar face near Market Street. She was too far away to hear his words, but after eighteen years as a prosecutor, she could spot hand-to-hand drug transactions across a football field.
Once the customer had left, she waved in Jake’s direction. Kiley turned to look, then held on to Diane’s leg. Her sweet little brown eyebrows were furrowed.
“That’s just a friend of your mommy.” She’d have to ask Kiley’s psychologist whether a lingering fear of men was to be expected.
Jake nodded, but then turned away to walk farther south. She supposed the presence of a deputy district attorney wasn’t good for a drug dealer’s business.
“You want some more cookie? Can you say cookie?”
Kiley was still clinging to her leg, but the worry in her eyes had transformed to panic. Her breath quickened, and Diane recognized all the signs of a serious meltdown.
“What’s wrong, sweetie? Is Mommy’s cookie monster all full? Is it nap time?”
Her daughter’s gaze moved south, and her grasp tightened. “Jake.”
“What did you say?”
Kiley’s lower lip trembled, but her next words were unmistakable. She pointed to a spot between her legs. “Jake. Snake.”
“How do you know —”
Snippets of images replayed in Diane’s visual cortex. A pair of Kiley’s soiled pants in a Ziploc bag, the source of the bodily fluids still unidentified. Jake’s frantic banter when she’d approached him about the Chance case. His utter certainty when he’d finally said, “Sorry, DiLi, never seen either one of these ugly crack-heads.” Fourteen pops, no convictions. No convictions meant no blood sample for the DNA data bank.
She tasted bile and chocolate at the back of her throat. What else had she been wrong about?
She pictured Trevor Williams on the stand, promising to tell the whole truth. Rachel Chance’s insistence of full responsibility: I’m so ashamed, but I can’t blame this on Kyle. I fell apart when he left me. Kyle Chance hugging his lawyer when Stone allowed him back in Kiley’s life. The lawyer for once appearing pleased to have helped a client.
As if Chance were standing before her, Diane remembered the clarity on his face when he’d opened the apartment door that night. She saw her daughter on that worn kitchen floor, gazing up with sleepy eyes, oblivious to her father’s blood beginning to soak into the bottom of her flowered flannel pajamas.
The grass and the tulips shimmered in the sunlight and went out of focus, as though the laws of gravity had been set in abeyance and would not be restored anytime soon.
BLIND JUSTICE
BY JIM FUSILLI
Angie and Turnip were best friends for as long as either could remember, beginning when Angie came to Turnip’s aid, grabbing Weber by his pale hair, bloodying his nose with a roundhouse right, then dribbling his skull on the sidewalk. Bobby Weber was in the first grade, Angie and Turnip in kindergarten at St. Francis of Assisi in downtown Narrows Gate.
That was twenty years ago, the winter of 1953, and since then nobody picked on Turnip twice.
Though they were unemployed, neither Angie nor Turnip lacked: Their widowed mothers, both of whom were born in the Apulia region of southern Italy, received pension checks from Jerusalem Steel as well as Social Security. They gave the boys what they wanted and then some, provided they spoke not of the source, figuring if anyone knew they received so much for doing nothing, the flow would be tapped. Whatever extra Angie and Turnip had, the neighborhood figured it came from those little jobs they did on the side.
Entering Muzzie’s one afternoon, Angie and Turnip were surprised to find, lounging on a platform above the round bar, a woman wearing only a purple boa and shoes that seemed made of glass. Last time they were here, they had seafood with a marinara sauce so spicy Angie knew Big Muzz was hiding two-day-old scungilli.
“Muzz,” said Turnip as he mounted the three-legged stool, “what happened to the scungilli?”
“There’s the scungilli,” Little Muzz said, nodding up at the stripper. He was checking pilsner glasses for cracks.
Propped on an elbow, the droopy blonde filed her nails.
Turnip held up a finger. “Yeah, but what’s she do?” he asked the bartender.
A Ping-Pong ball shot from her fica, just missing his head.
“That,” Little Muzz said.
“Who says?” Turnip asked.
Inching away, Angie already knew the answer.
“Who?” Little Muzz replied with a dark shrug. “Like you don’t know who.”
Big Muzz’s voice rumbled from where the kitchen used to be. “Turnip,” he bellowed. “Soldato wants you. Now.”