Concert of Ghosts Read online

  He squirmed in his seat, legs cramped and numb, stomach and head throbbing. He was over six feet tall, and weighed about 175, and it was goddamn hard to find the quiet eye of anything in the back of a cop car, especially after you’d just been casually beaten.

  The car turned, turned again. A green road sign was abruptly illuminated but vanished before Harry could read it. He wasn’t quite sure why in the absence of landmarks, but he had a sense of familiarity again, as if having traveled off the edge of the world the vehicle had found its way back. Houses appeared now, big Victorian homes set in large lots, places of ornate substance that rose up and up by means of steep narrow staircases into the darkness of attic rooms. These steadfast houses somehow reassured him, and the panic he’d felt before subsided—slightly, as a tide quietens when the wind drops for a while. But you know the wind will come again.

  He recognized Oswego, the outskirts of which had seemingly loomed from nowhere. Pale lamps, quiet leafy streets, here and there a neighborhood tavern closed for the night. The blue oval of a Genesee Cream Ale sign floated in a window like a distorted electric kiss. Near the railroad tracks a couple stood beneath a tree, the man’s surprised white face and the woman’s parted lips caught for a moment in headlights.

  “Took us a shortcut, Harry,” said the older cop. “Surprised you, heh?”

  “You got a bad case of nerves there, Harry,” the thin cop remarked.

  Tennant thought of maps, the veins of old roadways, blue reservoirs, creeks. He marveled, more from relief than admiration, at how the driver had found Oswego by this unknown route. The countryside could be slyly inscrutable, concealing from outsiders facets known only to the locals. Tennant felt the alienation of the stranger. After nine years in his wooded acres, he really knew very little about his chosen county.

  Now he remembered his absolute certainty that he was going to be walked into a darkened field and shot through the skull. It was funny, if you knew how to look at it the right way. The detached way.

  The car stopped outside City Hall, in the basement of which the jail was located. Harry’s panic, subdued so briefly, came fluttering back. There was nothing comical about jail.

  The cell smelled of a certain cheap disinfectant that was meant to be redolent of pine needles but instead suggested a potpourri of caustic chemicals. Alone, overpowered by the scent, clutching his neck where it hurt, Harry sat on the narrow bunk and gazed at the wall. Graffiti had been written and then partially erased. Old messages, jokes, obscenities. Here and there an isolated word could be read.

  He didn’t know how long he’d been in this room—an hour, two; he wore no watch. How long before he could call a lawyer? Authority loved the sadism of mystification, the silences and secrets. Authority’s victims lived like specimens suspended in murky liquid. You heard nothing, you waited, you floated in stillness.

  Tennant was afraid to close his eyes. It was like locking the shutters to your skull, in whose passageways he had no urge to wander. The trick was to concentrate on the walls. The graffiti could have been written by a person to whom English was a third language. Words combined in odd phrases:

  DIPSHIT BLACKBIRD CHUCKEE

  For a moment he wondered if there might be something significant in these words, a hidden meaning, but that was a dangerous game to play. You look long enough you can find almost anything.

  He walked around the cell, conscious of how the walls pressed against him; he had a suffocating sense of space dwindling. He wondered about his dog. Was she unconscious still, or had she risen, alone in the dark house, half-drugged, baffled? He clenched his hands: Confinement angered him. He wanted out. He wanted a lawyer. Bail. He walked to the door, smacked it a few times with his fists, called out.

  Nothing happened. A great silence prevailed.

  Goddamn. He’d sit down, think of nothing. He wasn’t going to let this room undo him. He managed to sleep briefly. When he opened his eyes a man was touching his shoulder.

  “Harry. Frank Rozak. Attorney.”

  Tennant’s mouth was dry. “Whose attorney?”

  “Yours if you want me.”

  “I didn’t call you. I don’t even know you.”

  “I keep my ears to the ground. I have that good old Yankee initiative for drumming up biz, Harry. Besides I’m the only insomniac lawyer in town. Solitaire till dawn. They call me the Vampire. I heard they brought you in. Figured I’d offer my services. If you prefer somebody else, okay with me.”

  “I don’t know anybody else.”

  “Yellow pages, Harry. Let your fingers do the walking.”

  “I haven’t even seen a telephone,” Tennant said. “I was under the impression I had some right to a call as soon as I was arrested.”

  “Ah. They come off as hicks around here about that kind of thing,” Rozak said indulgently. “You want your call, I’ll see to it immediately.”

  Tennant shook his head. He let the matter pass. What was he supposed to do—pick an attorney out of the phone book? A lottery. He studied Rozak, a gray-haired man in his mid-fifties with purple sacs under his eyes, leaden pouches large enough to contain small handwritten messages. His hands were bloodred and arthritic, knuckles swollen, the joints of the fingers ugly bulbs.

  “Two other things. The cops worked me over. And I didn’t get my rights read.”

  “Bless my soul, Harry. I’m shocked to the core.” Rozak laughed in a bronchial way. “First, they’ll say you were resisting arrest so they were obliged to squash you. And second they’ll claim they read you your rights anyhow. That’s a winged horse people in cells are always trying to jump. Didn’t read me my rights, so please can I fly out of here? This isn’t TV, Harry. Forget all that rights crap. Let’s see if we can spring you as soon’s possible.” Rozak looked at his watch. “It’s five A.M. You’ll go before Judge Stakowski at ten. We better talk bail.”

  “How much are we looking at?” Tennant asked.

  “You own your property, Harry?”

  “Free and clear.”

  “Market value—what?”

  “Sixty. Maybe seventy. More.”

  “My guess is bail will be set around twenty. You ever been in trouble with the law before, Harry? Any outstanding warrants? Serious priors?”

  “Nothing,” Tennant said.

  “You don’t sound too convincing there, Harry.”

  Tennant gazed at the man. “Nothing I remember,” he said.

  “You want me to defend you, you come clean. You don’t hide shit from me. That’s the way I play ball.” Rozak took a prescription bottle from his jacket and swallowed a maroon capsule. “Painkiller.” He gestured with one brutalized red hand.

  “Okay,” Tennant said. “Maybe there’s a traffic violation I overlooked years ago. Something like that. Who remembers that stuff?”

  Rozak smiled. “I don’t want surprises, Harry. I don’t want to suddenly discover there’s a bench warrant out for you. Know what I mean?”

  Tennant nodded. Traffic ticket, some unpaid fine, how could he know? The trivia of his life, the building blocks out of which a world is constructed—these things seemed intangible to him.

  “Here’s the next thing. The county attorney is a hard-nosed maggot called Flitt. If he’s down with his ulcer, which is often the case, then we’ll have to deal with a fellow by the name of Kant—one of your all-time major misnomers—who has an IQ that so far hasn’t registered on any known instrument. Kant would be better for us than Flitt. Any questions?”

  “How did they discover the crop?”

  Rozak said, “How else? Somebody informed. I saw the search warrant. Ironclad.”

  “And that’s it?”

  “An anonymous person drops a dime, Harry. A cop checks out the information, sees the crop, gets a warrant.”

  An anonymous person, Tennant thought. A ghost in the woods. Somebody, perhaps, in a low-flying plane. A walker in the forest.

  “So. You want me to represent you, Harry?”

  “You’ll be fine,”
Tennant said.

  “Lord, I get the biggest kick out of your enthusiasm. I’d shake hands on our association, Harry. But pressing the flesh is obviously awkward for me.” Rozak paused, walked around the room, looked thoughtful. “I don’t give a shit whether you’re guilty as hell, Harry. My job is to show you had nothing to do with the crop. So I’m going to need some kind of evidence about how you live, your income, stuff like that, which will demonstrate you didn’t need dope money to survive.”

  Evidence about how you live, Tennant thought. Exactly how did he live? He grew dope in the woods. That was it. That was his whole life. That was how he defined himself.

  “Understand this. The prosecution will want to know how a guy can survive on air. I need whatever you’ve got relating to sources of income.”

  “I’ll do what I can.” He wondered what. He had no bank account, no savings in any financial institution, no inheritance. He’d have to invent something plausible. Such as?

  “I also need background. Family. Character witnesses.”

  Background. Family. Character witnesses. These were knots on a string of personal identity. How did you begin to unravel them? Tennant looked at the attorney as if Rozak had just addressed him in a defunct language.

  “You got a problem with any of that, Harry?” Rozak asked. “I take it you have family somewhere. Father. Mother. Brothers maybe. Sisters.”

  Tennant felt cold. Rain had seeped through the soles of his boots and his socks were wet and the chill had begun to spread through his body. “My mother’s dead. I don’t have brothers or sisters.”

  “What about your father?”

  Tennant hesitated. “What about him?”

  “Is he alive?”

  Alive? Tennant shrugged. “I guess so.”

  Rozak sat down on the bunk. “You guess?”

  “I haven’t seen him in a while.”

  “A falling out,” Rozak said, shaking his head. “Happens. Father and son don’t see eye to eye.”

  “You could say that.”

  “You want to tell me where he lives and maybe I can contact him?”

  “Washington somewhere,” Tennant said. How vague, he thought. But nothing specific came to mind, not even his father’s face, which floated away from him even as he tried to recall the features. How long was it since he’d even thought about Rayland Tennant? “Look, I don’t want him involved. I don’t want you going near him.”

  Rozak sighed. “That’s up to you, Harry. But I still need to know I can call on somebody to swear blind there’s a halo round your head. A family priest? A doctor maybe?”

  “I don’t have anybody like that.”

  “Okay. You’re not religious. Me, I’m a card-carrying atheist and I haven’t been struck by lightning yet. But everybody’s got a doctor somewhere, Harry. Nobody goes through life on an apple a day, for God’s sake. Gimme the name of somebody who treated you for something, even if it was only tonsillitis.”

  Tennant closed his eyes, leaned back against the wall. He had from somewhere a memory of a caring man in a herringbone tweed suit, a physician with an easy manner, but if there was more to the recollection, it evaded him. “I guess I had one when I was a kid, but I don’t remember his name.” He looked at Rozak. “I don’t see how a doctor who treated me for—Christ knows, a cut, a cold, whatever, more than thirty years ago—could say anything remotely relevant about my character.”

  Rozak patted Tennant’s knee. “Hey. Cool down.”

  Tennant said, “I’m jumpy.”

  “Sure you are. You don’t need to be.”

  “I don’t want to go to jail.”

  Frank Rozak stood up; his skeleton creaked. He walked round the cell. His expression was pensive. He examined the graffiti in the manner of a man attempting to break an impossible code. He said, “I’ll be straight with you, Harry. You can forget jail. That’s the last place you’re headed.”

  “What makes you so certain?”

  Rozak smiled. He had a good smile, no fake dazzle, no used cars to hawk. “That’s a toughie to answer, Harry. Just trust me on it. You’ll walk. No two ways about it. Forget any charges. They’ll be dropped and you can go back to your little house in the woods. Free as a hawk. All you gotta do is sit tight.”

  “I don’t see how you can be so damn sure,” Tennant said. “You must know something I don’t.”

  Rozak shrugged. “I get paid to know things.” His expression, suddenly sly, mystified Tennant. “Like I say, just sit tight.”

  “What if this character Flitt has different ideas?” Tennant asked. “What if he decides to throw the book at me?”

  “In order to throw the book, my friend, first he’s got to find it.”

  “Meaning what?”

  Frank Rozak winked. “Get some rest, Harry.”

  “Wait,” Tennant said. He got up.

  But Rozak was already stepping out of the cell. The door was shut behind him. Tennant heard a key turn in the lock. He returned to the bunk, sat down, pondered Rozak’s statement. Okay. Okay. What was he—some flashy hotshot lawyer who knew how to drive a tractor-trailer through loopholes in the law? Or was he just doing his lawyerly thing, showering a client with optimism, a bit of positive reinforcement in the dead of night?

  Puzzled, Tennant listened to the silence of the cell. It occurred to him that he should have asked Rozak to find out about the condition of the Dane. Now it would have to wait.

  Tennant was taken before Judge Stakowski at 10:00 A.M. Frank Rozak was not in court. Tennant sat alone at the defendant’s table and wondered what had delayed the attorney. The courtroom was dark, old-fashioned, empty save for a couple of uniformed cops, a court reporter, two or three spectators, and a man in a cheap suit, who stood at the prosecutor’s table.

  Stakowski turned out to be a midget whose black robes engulfed him. As he climbed to his judicial bench he gave the impression of something inky and formless rising, as if the garment contained nothing but playful currents of air or balloons. Only when he was seated, seemingly on a column of cushions for height, did Stakowski’s face emerge from the robe. He had solemn eyes. He looked about the court in the fashion of a minister surveying his church. Had the pews been waxed? Were the stained-glass windows clean? Was this a fit space in which to play the game of law? Then let us pray. Satisfied in a gloomy kind of way, he directed that proceedings for the day begin. His voice was surprisingly deep, a big man’s voice.

  “Who is representing Mr. Tennant?” he asked.

  Tennant stood up. “My lawyer hasn’t arrived yet.”

  The judge frowned. “And who exactly is your lawyer, Mr. Tennant?”

  “Frank Rozak.”

  “Rozak?” the judge asked. He looked at the prosecutor. “Is Frank Rozak known to you, Mr. Kant?”

  Kant shook his head. “No, Your Honor.”

  The judge turned his attention to Tennant. “In what circumstances did you appoint this man?”

  “He came to my cell earlier this morning.”

  “And he offered to take your case?”

  “He did.”

  The judge was silent for a time. “Is he a local man? Somebody from another town? An import?”

  Tennant, who kept glancing at the door, said, “He told me he lives here.”

  “Peculiar,” said the judge. “I know every lawyer in this town, Mr. Tennant, and I’ve never heard of one called Rozak.”

  Tennant thought: They’ll clear this up in a moment. They’ll see a mistake has been made. Why wasn’t Rozak breezing into court right now, apologizing for being late? Did I imagine the man? No, Rozak had been real, all the way from the pain-swollen hands to the big open smile to the supreme air of confidence.

  “Is it possible you got the name wrong?” the judge asked.

  “It’s possible, I guess.”

  The judge looked at his watch, tapped his fingers. “Did he give you a card? A phone number?”

  Tennant shook his head. “He said he was called Frank Rozak. I didn’t ask
for ID, he never offered any.”

  Stakowski spoke quietly to one of the uniformed cops. Tennant couldn’t hear what was being said. The judge, dismissing the cop, stared curiously at Tennant.

  “It seems there’s no record of anyone visiting you in your cell, Mr. Tennant. A visitor would have been logged. There’s no such entry.”

  In a dry voice, Tennant said, “Obviously there’s been some kind of … oversight.”

  “Or some kind of mischief,” said the judge.

  “Mischief?”

  Stakowski ignored Tennant’s question. “In the circumstances, which I find somewhat odd, the court will appoint an attorney on your behalf. At least until your Mr. Rozak decides to show himself.”

  Bewildered, panicked, Tennant heard himself try to explain that Rozak was simply delayed, he’d turn up any moment, it was just a matter of time, but the legal proceedings, like a circus performed solely for the benefit of the clowns and acrobats themselves, went on as if he’d ceased to exist. A small bald man in a brown suit, a certain Harcourt McKay, was produced from among the spectators and appointed Tennant’s attorney of record. Much conferring went on around the judge’s bench between McKay, Kant, and Stakowski, three men who whispered in the manner of conspirators. Tennant, deflated, disappointed, puzzled, sat down. Rozak had vanished. But the show had to go on.

  As if he were listening to words being ferried toward him by a frail breeze, Tennant heard bail being discussed. Figures were bandied around. He had the impression he was in some kind of auction room. A hammer would come down when agreement was reached. The house and land were acceptable collateral for bail, although Kant, plagued by the peculiar syntax of a man who can’t see the end of any sentence he begins, grumbled about the accused’s reliability. Mumble mumble. Drugs. Mutter mutter. Serious business. McKay, who had a pompous delivery, claimed he needed time to study his client’s case and the nature of the charges.

  Judge Stakowski, seemingly weary of a business that had upset the smooth running of his court, and unwilling to perplex himself further over the mystery of Frank Rozak, set trial for a date six weeks hence. Tennant was enjoined to remain at his present place of residence and appear on the appointed day and time. In the meanwhile he was not permitted to leave the state, and if he intended to travel beyond the immediate vicinity, the court had to be notified. That was the end of the thing. Some papers were signed and Harcourt McKay, whose hands were sweaty little plump paws, led Tennant out of the courthouse.