Read Online Neptune Avenue by Gabriel Cohen - Free Book Online

very bad. I am afraid also.”
    Jack was careful not to look directly at her; he didn’t want her to stop talking. It all clicked into place. Her weirdness during the first interview. Her edginess around him. It wasn’t hostility, after all—it had been fear.
    “Do you know his name?”
    She chewed her lip. “You will not say to him that I am the one who telled you? You must make promise.”
    He nodded gravely. “You have my word on it.”
    She stared at him. He could almost see the gears of worry turning in her head.
    But she told him the name.
    When he stood up to go, she led him through her dark apartment, and they stood for a moment in her little foyer, a moment when time stretched out, full of something he could not name. “I’m so sorry about Daniel,” he said again. And then he took a risk: he held out his arms. For a moment, she just stood looking at him, and he thought that maybe she was offended or that she had just gone back to being cold, but she stepped forward and gave him a quick hug.
    After the door closed behind him, he stood out in the hallway for a moment, remembering the feel of her lithe body, pressed close to his heart.
    Out in his car, though, he slumped back in his seat. What the hell was he thinking? This woman was in a period of grief .
    He resolved to let Linda Vargas handle any future contacts—and to make sure that Daniel’s widow would receive any necessary police protection.

CHAPTER EIGHT
    T HE ROOM WAS SHAPED like a huge wood-paneled fish tank, and it was chilly, with an antiseptic smell. The ceiling was high; if it were lower, the proceedings might have felt too human, hardly the desired effect here in Brooklyn Supreme Court. Jack slipped into the back row of the public gallery, an uncommon experience for him. (He had been inside such courtrooms many times, but he usually sat up on the witness stand.) Now—here on the first day of his two days off—he had the time to take in random details, like the scuffed linoleum floor and the back of the pew in front of him, covered with graffiti scratchings: Cherry. Poppa D. And that great old standard, Fuck You.
    The jurors were not dressed for a noble proceeding: they looked as if they’d been plucked off a Brooklyn sidewalk. The judge, a tall, handsome black man, sat back in his leather throne with one hand splayed over his face as if he was getting a bad headache, perhaps inspired by the schleppy defense attorney, who stood next to the jury box anxiously shuffling his notes like an actor who had forgotten his lines.
    At the prosecutor’s table sat the assistant district attorney Jack had come to speak with; all he could see now was that she was tall and that she had gracefully graying hair. He had looked up the name given to him by Eugenia Lelo and found that this woman had prosecuted the man three years ago. Jack was eager to confront him, but he knew it was better to do some homework first.
    The witness on the stand was a patrol cop, a young guy with gelled, spiky hair who sat up at full attention, like some kind of wary woodland animal. As his testimony proceeded, Jack learned that he worked the Sixty-second Precinct—Bensonhurst—an Italian neighborhood with a growing population of Asians and Russians, one of whom sat in the loneliest seat in the house. The defendant was a small Russian man with a bald spot and no visible neck—that was all Jack could see from behind.
    The charge was fraud. The cop had been driving on the Shore Parkway when he came upon the defendant, parked at the side of the road in a rear-ended car, which also contained three other Russians. Behind it sat a crumpled car occupied by a frantic Korean woman. The Russkies claimed she had been negligent in her driving.
    The defense attorney searched for his next question. The judge asked a court officer to lead the jury out. Then he scowled down from the bench.
    “Counselor, I spent part of my weekend looking over the papers for this case. I don’t know what