A Very Bloody Christmas

“Ladies and gentlemen, the Commonwealth wants you to believe that Tevin Marston ran.”

Cassidy McNevin let that sit while she walked the length of the jury box. Her heels were loud on the old floor of Courtroom 1005. She’d chosen them for it.

“Detective Huff told you he ran. He told you twice. Once on direct, and once when I asked him to repeat it, because I wanted you to hear how sure he sounded.” She stopped in front of juror six, a retired SEPTA driver who’d been taking notes in green pen all week. “Then he told you he couldn’t remember which hand Tevin held the bag in. Or what color the bag was. Or whether there was a bag.”

Juror six’s pen stopped moving.

“I don’t need you to like my client. I need you to notice that the only witness against him can’t remember the evidence.”

She sat down. Tevin, nineteen and drowning in a borrowed blazer, leaned toward her.

“That’s it?”

“That’s it.”

“You didn’t say I was a good kid.”

“You stole a car in March.”

“That’s not what this is about.”

“Exactly. Sit up straight.”

He sat up straight.

The DA’s rebuttal took twenty minutes and said nothing. Cassidy used the time to study the room without appearing to. A bored court officer. Tevin’s grandmother in the second row, rosary wound twice around her wrist. A reporter from the Inquirer who only came to her trials because he hoped her surname would make the story.

And a man in the back row.

He hadn’t been there before the lunch recess. She’d have noticed. He was big enough that the bench looked built for someone smaller, dark suit, dark beard, hands resting on his knees so still he might have been carved there and the courthouse put up around him afterwards. His eyes never once went to the DA. They stayed on her.

She looked straight back at him. Most men looked away when she did that.

He didn’t.

The jury went out at 2:40pm and came back at 4:15pm. When she turned to check the gallery as the foreman stood, the back row was empty.

“Not guilty.”

Tevin’s grandmother made a sound like a kettle coming to the boil. Tevin grabbed Cassidy’s hand and pumped it hard enough to hurt.

“I owe you.”

“You owe me not stealing any more cars.”

“Deal.”

“I’ve heard that before, Tevin.”

Outside the Criminal Justice Center, Filbert Street was gray slush and taxis. She’d made it ten steps toward the subway when she saw the Mercedes.

Black, idling at the curb with its hazards on, a parking ticket under the wiper that nobody inside would ever pay. Two men in the front. She knew them both. She’d known them since she was in pigtails and they’d let her ride on their shoulders at the Port Richmond parade.

She kept walking.

The rear door opened behind her. Footsteps. Then her father was beside her, matching her pace with his hands in his coat pockets, as if they did this all the time. They didn’t. Braden McNevin got driven everywhere. She hadn’t seen him walk a city block in five years.

“Good result,” he said.

“You were in there?”

“I had someone in there.”

She thought of the back row and stopped dead. “Who?”

“Not one of mine.” He went on a couple of steps before he turned. Sixty-two, thick white hair, the McNevin nose that had skipped her and landed on Rory. “Can we sit down somewhere?”

“No.”

“Cass.”

“You’ve got two minutes and a public sidewalk.”

He looked up at the sky as if checking it for rain. Then he said, “Three of ours dead in two weeks. Two of theirs.”

“I read the papers.”

“The papers don’t know half of it. The truce is finished by Christmas unless something gives.” He held her gaze. “The old men have been talking. Ours and theirs. Father Reilly’s been in the middle of it.”

“Good for Father Reilly.”

“They want a marriage.”

She laughed. It came out loud enough that a man in a Phillies hat turned around.

Her father didn’t laugh.

“You’re serious.”

“Sláine Durnin.”

She said nothing. A bus went past and threw slush across the curb. Her father didn’t step back from it, so she didn’t either.

“Absolutely not.”

“I told them you’d say that.”

“Then why are you here?”

“Because I told them I’d ask anyway.” He took one hand out of his pocket and held it out flat, palm up, as if offering her something she couldn’t see. “You think I want this? His family put your brother in the ground.”

“You don’t know that.”

“I know enough.”

“You’ve never known anything, Dad. You’ve decided things.”

That landed. She watched it land. He put his hand back in his pocket.

“Fionn Gorman,” he said.

The name went through her like cold water. She’d got Fionn probation last spring. Seventeen, mouthy, adored his mother.

“He’s running for Hudnall now, down at the terminal. If this goes the way it’s going, the Durnins won’t come at me first. They’ll start with the kids on the docks, because that’s how it starts.” He paused. “And your cousin Shauna’s husband drives for us. She’s due in February.”

“That’s not fair.”

“No. It isn’t.” He looked tired, which was worse than looking old. “I’m not threatening you, Cass. I’m telling you who’s on the list. You can count funerals as well as I can.”

She looked down the street. The subway entrance was right there. She could walk down those stairs and go home to her apartment and her bookshelves and her name on the door on Walnut Street, the life she’d built with her own money and nobody’s blood on it.

And in three weeks she’d be sitting in St. Columba’s in a black dress, listening to Fionn Gorman’s mother scream.

“If I do this,” she said, “I do it my way.”

Her father’s shoulders came down an inch.

“Meaning?”

“Meaning I’ll have a contract on his desk by tomorrow. Meaning nobody in our family touches a single thing about my life, my practice or my money. Meaning when this is over, I’m out. Properly out.”

“He won’t like that.”

“Good.”

Braden almost smiled. “You sound like your mother.”

“Don’t push it.”

He went back to the car. She stood on the curb and watched it slide into traffic with its hazards still blinking, and only when it turned onto Broad did she notice the handle of her briefcase had pressed a red groove across both palms.

♥︎♥︎♥︎

“You’ve written sixty pages.”

Cassidy didn’t look up. “Sixty-two.”

Maria Vega stood in the doorway of Cassidy’s kitchen in pajama pants printed with tiny avocados, holding Cassidy’s spare key in one hand and a Wawa bag in the other. It was ten to two in the morning.

“You texted me,” Maria said, “the words I’m getting married, bring snacks.”

“I did.”

“I thought you’d been hacked.”

“I’m on the dissolution clauses.”

Maria put down the bag and came round the table to read over her shoulder. Cassidy let her. Maria had been her paralegal for four years and her best friend for most of them, and in that time had seen her cry over exactly two things: Rory’s anniversary and a Third Circuit ruling.

“‘Section nineteen,’” Maria read. “‘Neither party shall enter the other’s residence without forty-eight hours written notice, except in the event of fire, flood, or the death of a party, in which event the surviving party may enter solely to confirm the death.’”

“It’s thorough.”

“Cass. Who are you marrying?”

Cassidy reached for her coffee. Fourth cup. Cold. She drank it anyway.

“Sláine Durnin.”

Maria lowered herself into the next chair by degrees, as if the chair might object.

"The Sláine Durnin.”

“Is there another one?”

“The one who allegedly fed a guy to his own boat engine?”

“That was never proven.”

“Because you’d have been his lawyer if it had been.” Maria opened the Wawa bag and handed her a soft pretzel without being asked. “Your dad?”

“My dad. And Father Reilly. And every old man in two parishes.”

“And you said yes.”

“I said yes on conditions.” Cassidy tore the pretzel in half. “Separate houses. Separate money. Separate everything. I marry him in a church, I stand next to him at whatever dinners they make us go to, and we both make it so unbearable that our families beg us to annul it by Easter.”

“Does he know that’s the plan?”

“He will tomorrow at ten.”

Maria chewed in silence. Then she pulled Cassidy’s laptop toward her.

“What are you doing?”

“You’re about to walk into a room with a man you’ve never seen, and you’ve written sixty-two pages about him.” Maria was already typing. “I’m finding out what he looks like.”

“I don’t care what he looks like.”

“Liar. You’ve changed clothes twice since I got here.”

“I spilled coffee.”

“Twice?”

Cassidy didn’t dignify that. She went back to section nineteen and added the words or a gas leak, and was considering whether a burst pipe counted as flood when Maria made a small strangled noise.

“Okay,” Maria said. “Okay. So. I need to amend my position on this whole thing.”

“What?”

“He’s hot, Cass. Like criminally. Like you’d defend him for free.”

“Show me.”

Maria turned the laptop around.

It was a long-lens shot from a society page, some charity dinner at the Union League last spring. A man in a black suit coming down a flight of stone steps, half-turned to say something to someone out of frame. Dark hair fallen across his forehead. A full beard. Heavy brows over eyes that regarded the camera as if it had personally disappointed him.

Cassidy put the pretzel down.

“What?” Maria said.

“He was there.”

“Where?”

“In my courtroom. Today. Back row.” She could see him perfectly, hands on his knees, refusing to look away. “He came in after lunch. He left before the verdict.”

Maria stared at her. “Your fiancé came to watch you work before he agreed to marry you?”

“He’s not my fiancé.”

“Cass.”

Cassidy pulled the laptop closer and studied the photo again. The eyes. The mouth that didn’t look like it had ever smiled at anything. He’d sat in that room for two hours and watched her take a detective apart, and then he’d stood up and walked out without waiting for the verdict.

He hadn’t needed to wait.

He’d come to look at her before he said yes, and whatever he’d seen, he’d already made up his mind.