Bad Lawyer (23 page)

I managed to work until midnight before my concentration gave out. With no hope of sleep, I put on my coat and hat, jammed my .32 into my pocket, and went for a walk. I don’t remember having any specific destination, no goal more complex than exhaustion. It was very cold outside, and Union Square was deserted. Above the soft puddles of orange light thrown by the streetlamps, the bare branches of a dozen oaks and maples cut the skyline into small, sharp fragments. Sheets of cardboard, the abandoned homes of the homeless, skidded over the grass, piled up against the empty benches. A small rat, jaws working furiously, stuck its narrow head over the rim of a trash basket as I walked by. It regarded me through round black eyes for a moment, then dove back into the garbage.

As I left the park and walked east along 17th Street, I felt the emotional mix that had driven me into the cold, the pain, the anger, the fear, begin to settle. I slid my right hand down into my coat pocket, circled the pistol’s stock with my fingers, caressed the trigger as if stroking the throat of a kitten. The wind pushed between my shoulders, urged me forward, told me not to be afraid, that nothing more could be done to me. That I was free at last.

S
OMEWHERE AROUND ELEVEN THE
next morning, while Janet Boroda, my new paralegal, read motions, and Wendy Houseman, my equally new secretary, explored the computer systems created by Julie, I opened the box of police reports sent over by Carlo Buscetta. The package included reports filed by the forensic unit, by Alfonso Rodriguez and Oliver Kapell, the two patrolmen who’d responded to Maybelle Higginbotham’s 911 call, and by Detective Shawn McLearry who’d discovered the cocaine. The reports were in no particular order, the various pages mixed together as if they’d been shuffled as they came off the copier. The strategy on Buscetta’s part may have been one of harassment; if so it backfired, because I was forced to examine each page carefully in order to reconstruct the entire sequence. In the course of that reconstruction, my attention was drawn to several pages, each bearing the signature and badge number of Patrolman Alfonso Rodriguez, that had obviously been copied from a small, spiral notebook.

One of the jobs assigned to the first officers responding to a homicide, after making sure the deceased is actually deceased and securing the scene, is the maintenance of a log. Theoretically, the names and ranks of individuals entering or leaving the scene are recorded in the log, along with the time of day. In actual practice, on the rare occasions when the log was included in discovery material supplied by the prosecution, I’d found it to be sloppily kept with personnel logged in, but not out, names badly misspelled or completely illegible, time of day left off altogether.

Patrolman Rodriguez’s log, on the other hand, might have come out of an academy training manual. Not content with mere names, Rodriguez had recorded ranks and functions, badge or civilian identification numbers, time entering and leaving to the minute. All in a small, precise handwriting that could only have been taught by a ruler-wielding nun.

That precision was very good news for Priscilla Sweet because Rodriguez had logged Detectives Shawn McLearry and Boris Karansky onto the crime scene at 6:31
P.M.
, then back out at 6:53. According to McLearry’s report, on the other hand, he and his partner, on their initial entry, had checked Byron for a pulse, walked through the apartment in search of other victims or perpetrators (discovering the cocaine in the process), then exited immediately. Even by the most generous estimate, the detectives’ initial, warrantless search should not have taken more than five minutes. McLearry and Karansky had been inside for twenty-two.

I took that information to Rikers Island and Priscilla Sweet, offered it as a prelude to our regular work session. Priscilla had come out of protective custody the day before, and seemed in decent, if subdued, spirits. I recall her gaze as frank, but not challenging, her customary smile as absent.

“The questions I’m gonna put to Judge Delaney go something like this,” I concluded. “If the cocaine was in plain view, why didn’t Rodriguez find it when he went through the apartment? If all McLearry and Karansky did was look for other victims, why did they spend twenty-two minutes inside?” I stopped to light a cigarette. “What I might do, if Delaney allows it, is put on a little demonstration, maybe time a cursory search of the courtroom and the judge’s chambers, see how long it actually takes.” I tossed the match on the floor, dropped the pack on the table. “If I convincingly demonstrate that McLearry’s a liar, Delaney might exclude the cocaine.”

“Might?” Priscilla ran her tongue across her front teeth. “If you prove the bastards are lying, how can he do anything else?”

I allowed myself a quick smile, but kept my voice even. “It’s a law and order age. All those reporters in the gallery, everybody who reads or watches those reporters? Let’s just say the body politic doesn’t care for technicalities. The public may accept your defense, but they want to hear it, so judges mostly rule for the prosecution and let the Appellate Court reverse.” I got up suddenly and turned away. Caleb had first posed the question: why hadn’t Priscilla gotten rid of the cocaine before the cops arrived? The obvious answer was that she’d wanted the drug to be found, that it made the initial lie she’d told Elizado Guzman, the one about the cops booking just enough cocaine to make it look good while stealing the rest, believable. And that was true whether she’d left it locked in the trunk, or out where the cops were sure to find it.

“We do have one thing going for us,” I said, my face to the wall. “Delaney needn’t fear the wrath of the voting public, because he’s about to retire. It all depends on how he wants to be remembered, and what I’m hoping is that he’s contrary enough to exit with a raised finger.”

In the days that followed, I settled into a routine that if not actually comforting, was at least endurable. I spent the mornings with Rebecca Barthelme, preparing witnesses, the afternoons at Rikers Island with Priscilla, my nights roaming the island of Manhattan in a fruitless search for an unambiguous fact. On Tuesday afternoon, I met Carlo Buscetta in Delaney’s chambers, received a manila envelope stuffed with various technical reports. I didn’t read them immediately, because Carlo, a malicious grin bisecting his hatchet-thin face, then introduced me to his newly appointed cocounsel, a black ADA named Isaiah Hazleton. I’d been up against Hazleton before, knew him to be quiet and competent, knew also that he had not been chosen for his attitude or his ability. Carlo had decided to play the race card, a fact his triumphant smirk made abundantly clear.

Judge Delaney had a surprise of his own. In response to my request for the earliest possible trial date, he announced, “April Fools Day seems appropriate. I’ll hear motions, then we’ll proceed directly to trial.”

“April 1 is fine by me,” I told Delaney before informing him that I expected to present a dozen witnesses to a pattern of physical abuse stretching back ten years. Carlo protested on the grounds of relevance, announced that he would file motions to exclude such testimony. I promised to respond in a timely fashion.

All very predictable. Carlo knew he would lose on this issue, but he had to go forward. If he got lucky, Judge Delaney might limit the scope of the testimony, but since I didn’t intend to document Byron’s violence in mind-numbing detail, I wasn’t particularly worried about it.

Outside, in the hallway, as Carlo sped off to make an appearance in another courtroom, I again shook Isaiah Hazleton’s hand. “You don’t look real happy, Isaiah. That because it’s been ten years since you had to sit in the second chair?”

Hazleton was a handsome man, tall and powerfully built, with a pair of liquid brown eyes that would have been more appropriate on a social worker. He raised those eyes to the ceiling, laid his hand over his heart. “Sacrifices must be made,” he intoned. “Sacrifices for which there will be an eventual reward.”

“Only if you win,” I said as I turned away. “If you lose, you join Carlo in the toilet.”

“Thank you for sharing that, Sid,” he called to my retreating back. “And please try not to weep as you read ’em.”

I puzzled over his last remark until I got to the waiting area at Rikers Island and examined the forensic material handed to me by Carlo. I remember glancing at the autopsy results, discovering no surprises, then jumping to a serology report from Mount Livmore Technical Laboratories. An examination of Byron’s blood established both that he was extremely drunk (blood alcohol level: .42, as predicted) and that he’d been using cocaine at the time of his death, also no surprise.

I made a mental note to fax the autopsy results to Kim Park that evening, then finally got to the document that inspired Isaiah’s parting comment. According to the NYPD’s forensic lab, a print of my client’s right thumb had been found in two places: on the gun, just below the cylinder, and on the side of an unspent cartridge within the cylinder.

Priscilla was brought down a few minutes later, but I didn’t confront her until I was ready to leave. Then, as I packed my bags, I said (just as if I hadn’t demanded that she craft her story to meet the legal definition of self-defense), “You should have told me, Priscilla, you should have told me about loading the gun.”

“It was Byron’s gun,” she said, her voice dropping away toward the end, wary now.

“It was an unregistered revolver found in an apartment leased in your name. That’s presumptive evidence that you possessed it. And the fact that your fingerprint appears on a bullet found
inside
the chamber …” I was tempted to produce a smirk worthy of Carlo Buscetta, but settled for a distasteful sniff. “The question that arises, Priscilla, is how, if you were in immediate fear of your life, you found time to load the gun?” I smiled. “Just something else to think about. I’m sure we’ll get past it.”

Two days later, I was on my way to Caleb’s burial, flying tourist class to a tiny airport outside Brantley, Alabama. The trip was actually torturous, with a stopover in Raleigh-Durham, and a change in Mobile to a plane so small it might have been launched with a rubber band. It was close to eleven at night when I finally reached the Paradise Motel, the only motel in the area rated by the AAA. At the time, I feared that I’d walk into a hot sheet hotel, be plagued with screeching bedsprings and groans of illicit ecstasy. Instead, quotations from the Christian bible adorned virtually every surface, from the office door to the pillow on my bed.

Sometime after dawn—I remember the drapes across the window edged in pale orange light—I woke up to find myself crying. I’d been dreaming of Julie, that she was in terrible trouble and that it was my fault. I couldn’t recall the details of the dream and I couldn’t stop crying, either. A sorrow as pure and grim as the pale shoots rising from the black Alabama soil enveloped me. My chest tightened again, until I was sipping at the air like an asthmatic at a cat show. For a very long time, I couldn’t formulate a coherent thought. Instead, ideas and images whirled through my consciousness like swarming bees.

I don’t know how long I remained in that state. When I slowly came back to myself, the light behind the drapes was sharp and clear. I was sitting on the floor with my back pressed up against the foot of the bed, my arms wrapped across my chest. On one level, I knew it was time to move, to get into the shower, pull myself together; and if it was simply a matter of attending Caleb’s funeral, I might have done so.

Priscilla’s image wandered into my consciousness; she was smiling that tight, ironic smile, the one that claimed a special knowledge, a knowledge which you could not share, which you could barely comprehend. I remember holding that image, clinging to it, my face covered with a mix of tears and snot. Long ago, my mother had written
DEATH MAKES FREE
at the end of her journal. But Caleb, lying in his coffin, and Julie, for whom I held out no hope, put the lie to that declaration. Magda had been looking for an excuse; she’d hoped to justify her life, as if she’d actually chosen it. And what I understood, sitting on the floor in Room 208 of the Paradise Motel, was that despite my self-created, day-to-day frenzy, I was trapped in a state close to paralysis. And no jury verdict could free me.

I
ARRIVED AT THE
home of Miss Minerva Talbot, Caleb’s great-aunt and the family matriarch, at ten o’clock. Caleb’s body was laid out in the parlor, but I didn’t go in right away. Instead, I agreed to a second breakfast, sat in the kitchen while Minerva mixed pancake batter, poured out coffee and orange juice, dropped spoonfuls of batter into a cast iron skillet. We were alone when she started, but relatives began to drift in as we spoke. They entered without knocking, men, women, and children, pushing through the back door, calling out familiar greetings. The adults shook my hand politely, the younger children simply stared.

Most of them, I assume, knew little or nothing of my relationship with Caleb; they seemed surprised, perhaps even impressed, that I’d made the journey. Minerva, on the other hand, had assumed the role of family confidant after Caleb’s parents died. A very small, very old lady, she cocked a wooden spoon in my direction as she spoke of the decade she’d spent in New York.

It wasn’t until Ettamae Harris arrived, just before eleven, that I found the courage to approach the open coffin. Jews don’t look at their dead. The most orthodox wrap the body in a shroud, secure the coffin lid with wooden pegs, drop the box into the ground within twenty-four hours. But even those Jews like myself, whose Jewish identity is wholly tribal, keep the coffin closed. Perhaps that’s because we came late to the idea of an afterlife, that prior to the beginning of the common era, death promised little more to the Hebrew people than rot and corruption.

The upshot was that, despite having been to Christian funerals before, I couldn’t bring myself to look down on Caleb’s face. And not because I feared collapse. The truth of it, which I understood at the time, was that I was temporarily cried out, that the emotion which kept my eyes glued to a spray of flowers mounted on a wire stand just behind the coffin was much closer to dread than sorrow.