Free In This Rain by S. J. Rozan Page B

doorway, just before he left, he said, “And do something about that for-shit shoring, Sonny. I know you hate to waste the good money you’re paying Manelli to not see it. But fix it. All this rain, more coming tomorrow, something’s bound to give. Someone could get killed.”

CHAPTER
16
    Heart’s Content
    During the trial Joe’s lawyer had told him he didn’t look sorry enough.
    “But it wasn’t his fault. Why should he look sorry?” Ellie had defended Joe stoutly, a loyal wife, a believer to the end. Past the end, or so she claimed: a believer still. Though she’d divorced him and was “moving on.”
    “Because when a child dies everyone’s supposed to be sorry,” Joe’s lawyer told her. “Whether it’s your fault or not.”
    There wasn’t much Joe could do about it, though. He couldn’t manufacture tears, or a look of public sadness, not even the agitated position-shifting of anguish and regret. Through the trial’s four days he sat, his body still (not calm, but looking calm, he knew), his shadowed eyes darting from speaker to speaker (prosecutor, witness, judge) with an intensity he couldn’t control, a sharpness that made people flinch.
    “It’s a Manhattan jury, Joe, look at them! Everyone who isn’t black is some kind of white liberal, except the Irish guy who’s probably pissed off at you about O’Doul and the Korean woman who probably doesn’t give a shit. Ashley was a cute little black kid, you’re a college-boy Jew. Her father’s a bus driver, you own a house, in Riverdale yet. Joe, you gotta give me something to work with.”
    If that’s the way it is, Joe thought, maybe I should have hired a black lawyer instead of you, Feinberg.
    But he still said nothing, because he knew what his lawyer meant.
    He didn’t look sorry.
    But he was sorry.
    Sorrow was a part of him now, a stone in his gut, poison in his veins. Not guilty of the crime of which he stood accused— taking graft from Sonny O’Doul— he was unmistakably guilty of something else: an arrogance that had said the crusade he was on, the capture of the archvillain Larry Manelli, was of overriding importance. Other problems could be tossed away, left littering the roadside like debris from a glorious parade for others to clean up after he, in victory, was gone.
    Like the blood-spattered debris littering a downtown sidewalk after a shoring collapse. Shoring he’d cavalierly told Sonny O’Doul to repair, and then put out of his mind, gave not one further thought to, until the evening news reports and the ring of his phone.
    Manelli and O’Doul, in separate deals, had both pled guilty to bribery, Manelli for demanding bribes, O’Doul for paying them. The pair also pled to reckless endangerment, and Manelli additionally to misuse of public funds (he solicited his payoffs while on the clock), harassment (once, when O’Doul’s horse at Belmont beat Manelli’s by a length, Manelli had said, “You fucking mick bastard, I’ll cut your balls off”), and theft (Buildings Department markers, pads, pens, and tape were found at his Long Island home). Manelli was sentenced to varying lengths of prison time on the various counts, to be served, because of the bargain, simultaneously instead of consecutively. O’Doul was sentenced to far less time because, though no one but he himself denied he was a slimy sleazeball, O’Doul, as a private citizen, hadn’t violated the public trust.
    And because he was willing to roll over. Talking freely and fast, he provided as much evidence as the prosecutor could have hoped for against Larry Manelli. In return, he got a sentence shaved as close to the minimum as his lawyer could contrive.
    And also because he offered as a bonus and without being asked, evidence against that other accused violator of the public trust, Joe Cole.
    *
    “Is any of O’Doul’s shit true?” Feinberg, at one of the endless meetings in his office before the trial began, jabbed his thumb toward the box of tapes and transcripts his discovery motion had