days.”
“Sorry. I mean that,” Cohn insisted. He shuffled the pictures into a neat stack. “Incidentally, what’s Miss Beaudry doing for money these days?”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“She back in the trade?”
“She’s unemployed.”
“For someone like her,” Cohn said, “that’s a distinction without a difference. As for getting beaten up, you bed down with a speed freak, I’d call that assumption of risk.”
“Bed down?”
“Apparent consent.”
“Look, Tony, I said she wasn’t going to testify.”
“You just want me to pass along information I have no way of knowing is true or even accurate. But I do have a pretty good inkling it’s motivated by revenge.”
“It’s the truth.”
“Is that you talking or this intermediary of yours?”
Abatangelo glanced uneasily toward the dragon in the corner again. He almost imagined it saying: Distinction Without a Difference.
“You shouldn’t even be talking to this woman,” Cohn went on. “Let alone this. Given all you’ve been through, you are a very slow study, mister.”
“You saw the pictures,” Abatangelo said. “Is a little revenge so out of order?”
“On my bar card?” Cohn got up, moved toward the door. “Look, it’s a story. Even a good story- ”
“I’m not asking for a Supreme Court appearance.”
“No. I know what you’re asking.” Cohn grabbed one of the Buddhist phalluses from his tea cabinet. Not the largest one, not the smallest one. He clutched it like a rabbit’s foot. “You should hear yourself. Do you have any idea how many guys come out of the joint totally fixated on doing damage to the clown who shacked up with the little woman?”
“That’s not what this is about.”
“No fooling. What is this, you miss prison?”
“This guy’s out of control, Tony, he’s overdue. He’s a sociopath.”
“He’s a skank, a tweak. He’s got bad companions. The rest is hearsay, three times removed. And you’re a convicted felon. Credibility zip. Christ, if you’re so bent about it, why not just go out there and whack him yourself?”
“That’d be poetic, wouldn’t it?”
“Oh good God.” Cohn turned away, rubbed the phallus clean of dust and put it back. He went to the door and pushed it open. “I didn’t hear that, all right? There, you came for a favor, you just got one. Look, I’m not brushing you off, but I’ve been bumped up from second chair in a deposition tomorrow. You know how it is.”
Abatangelo ran his hands through his hair. A jet of bile lodged in his chest.
“Tony,” he began. “Look, what I just said, I didn’t mean anything. After what he did to her, sure, I wouldn’t cry too hard if he ended up on the bloody end of a stick. But I’m not about to run on out and clip the guy. You know that, right?”
His voice was quieter than he wanted it to be. It made him sound insincere.
“Prison did something to you,” Cohn said. “You’ve changed, know that? You used to be smarter.” He gestured to the doorway, and for that moment seemed precisely, again, the newfound man.
Abatangelo picked up the photographs from the desk and put them back in his pocket. “Yeah,” he said. “So I’m told.”
He dragged himself through the door and down the hall. As he reached the stair, Cohn called out from his office doorway. He sounded vaguely apologetic.
“One last piece of advice?” he said. “Stay clear of friends in trouble. They never want to hear the truth. Not from you.”
To work off his rage, Abatangelo drove south through China Basin then back downtown, weaving among taxis and delivery vans, hitting his horn, cursing out the window. A bicycle messenger spat on his windshield and flipped him off. An executive screamed “Asshole” from the sudden refuge of a car hood. We have changed, Abatangelo thought. We used to be smarter.
The Grant Street Gate outside Chinatown, fouled by birds, reminded him of the temple dragon in Cohn’s office. Assumption of Risk. Distinction without a Difference. Cohn had laughed at him- no baring of teeth, no little heh- hehs, but laughing just the same.
He wondered how Shel was doing. He felt an impulse to call off the hunt and go back, see how she was holding up, but the countering impulse held sway: Press on. The remaining drive dissolved in a frenzy of taillights, the braying rhythm of his horn, a fluid maze of other cars and the brief, urgent spaces between them. He parked in the garage at Fifth and Mission, removed the negatives from the photo packet and locked them in the trunk, tucking the prints into his pocket.
He was looking for a reporter named Bert Waxman, and found him in a bar named Benny’s. The place catered to the newspaper crews, and as Abatangelo broke through the doorway he confronted a bristling wall of noise. It was five o’clock, change of shift. The crowd stood two deep at the bar, the tables were full. Sawdust and peanut shells littered the floor. The men’s room door stood open, revealing mounds of ice melting in the urinals.
Abatangelo wandered the bar’s various rooms, searching the faces. He found Waxman at a corner table all the way in the back, sitting alone, face flushed with drink. His wavy red hair receded in front; he wore tortoiseshell glasses and a bow tie. Across the tabletop before him ravaged envelopes and crumpled mail lay scattered like debris.
Abatangelo had met Waxman during the Oregon trial, which the reporter came north to cover for the local alternative press- the “rad rags.” Alone among the reporters in the courtroom, Waxman refused to feed at the government trough, befriending the defense team instead. Tipped to Tony Cohn’s plan of attack on the informant, he detailed every squirm, every backstep, every lie as it came out on the stand. He followed up with the agents, gave them a chance to hang themselves in private interviews, then pronounced them corrupt bunglers in print. When his stories got picked up by the newswires, he got blackballed from the U.S. Attorney’s office. Local narcs, tipped by the feds, searched his hotel room for drugs.
He returned to the Bay Area after the trial equipped with a sterling new vision of himself. He began talking book projects, courting publishers, naming the editors he’d met or intended to meet. The books never quite materialized. His articles grew repetitious and sparse, he gained a reputation for slant. He started to drink a bit too hard. In the past few years he’d managed to beg his way back from limbo, taking stringer work, puff pieces, anything.
Since his release from prison, Abatangelo had come across Waxman’s by-line a half dozen times or so. There were indications Waxman was hitting his stride again. Though something less than pulsating, his most recent pieces did reveal a little of the old spine. By and large they focused on the radical right, the militia movement, the so-called tax revolt. Waxman brought a feverish devotion to his subjects, his prose teemed with drum-poundings and evocations of doom. All things considered- particularly the botched attempt to bring Cohn on board- Abatangelo found Waxman ripe with potential.
He pulled up a chair and sat down without a word. Waxman stopped reading and looked up, blinking in mild astonishment. Abatangelo extended his hand. “Maybe you remember me,” he said. “Dan Abatangelo. Ten years ago, you covered my trial, a federal CCE bit, up in Oregon.”
Waxman frowned, blinked, then it registered. His eyes flared and he offered an expansive smile. “A decorated veteran of our fabled War on Drugs,” he intoned, reaching out to take Abatangelo’s hand, shaking it avidly. “Ten years, it’s been that long?”
“Got raised a few weeks ago.”
Waxman blew out a gusty sigh and shook his head. “Fucking atrocity what they did to men like you. Marijuana. Christ. And for what? To let the real gangsters take over.”
Abatangelo nodded toward the ransacked envelopes and letters spread out across the tabletop. “Catching up with your admirers?”
Waxman laughed acidly, picked up one letter and tossed it onto a pile of others, as though into a fire. “I wrote a piece last week, about this Christian telethon that took place down around San Diego. They were raising money
