Bad Lawyer (25 page)

“What prevented you from leaving, hiding for the six months it would take your husband to die of natural causes? The jury’s gonna want to know and Carlo’s gonna raise the question with every witness we call. You haven’t told me whether Byron spent any time in the emergency room or if he had a personal doctor, but Carlo will have already pursued that angle. In any event, the autopsy results are definitive. They’ve convinced my own expert.”

Priscilla’s gray eyes bore into mine. They remained fixed, even when she tilted her chin up to exhale a stream of gray smoke.

“I think what we can do here is make a virtue of necessity,” I continued. “Byron knew he was dying and he was determined to take you with him. After he beat you that last time, as you lay in your own excrement, he told you that you would never again leave the apartment, that he was going to kill you, then kill himself.

“You spent two days in bed, trying to devise a means of escape. You thought, for instance, of climbing down the fire escape, but the window was covered with a locked grate and Byron had the key. You thought about waiting for Byron to go into the bathroom, then dashing out into the street, but the bedroom door was kept closed and the one time you opened it, Byron, after repeating his threat, again attacked you.

“Finally, Byron came into the bedroom, told you that your time was short. He’d been up for two days, drinking heavily, snorting cocaine every fifteen minutes to stay awake. His eyes were yellow and he was bent forward in pain. He seemed on the verge of collapse, but he was coherent enough to display that lit cigarette you told me about, to threaten you with a very slow, very painful death.

“He left then, for a final snort of coke, a last celebration before the final act. In desperation, without any real plan, you took the gun from a shelf in the bedroom closet and examined it carefully. Of course, you didn’t know that revolvers don’t have safeties, so the cylinder popped out when you pushed the lever and one of the bullets fell to the floor. You picked it up, reloaded, put on your clothes, went to confront Byron.

“When Byron saw you with the gun, he just laughed. That’s when you knew there was no way out. You were trapped and your choices had narrowed to life or death. Then Byron started to come out of the chair and …” I pointed my finger at her, whispered, “Bang.”

We stared at each other for a moment, then I sat down, lit a cigarette, sucked the smoke down into my lungs.

“That’s nasty,” Priscilla finally said. “That’s very, very nasty.” Her tone, as I read it, was admiring.

A few minutes later, we got down to our regular work. I wanted the jury to know something about the early phase of Byron’s and Priscilla’s relationship, the pre-drug, pre-violence days at Columbia. Priscilla, though she could understand why she needed to convince black jurors that she’d once been in love with her husband, was having a hard time. Her presentation was lifeless and unconvincing, her tone that of a bored child forced to recite.

We went at it for an hour, until Priscilla finally stopped me with a shake of her head. “I can’t get it back,” she insisted. “I can’t get any of it back.” Her eyes dropped to her folded hands. “There were no limits to my life, to what I could become. At least that’s what I believed when I left my parents’ home for Columbia. When I think about it now, I feel like a jerk. I feel like one of those cheap roses you buy at the fruit stands, the kind that fall over when you put them in water.” She raised her head, fixed me with a pair of glistening gray eyes that reminded me of rain-streaked pavement. “What it’s come down to is mere survival. I can’t get beyond that, to actually want my future. Survival isn’t something you want. It’s like sleep; it has no promise.”

She took another cigarette from the pack on the table, lit it quickly. “I’ve ruined too many lives. I’m responsible for Byron, for Caleb and Julie. When I look back, I can’t think of a single individual whose life I made better. Not one.”

As before (and as expected), I was completely unable to gauge Priscilla’s sincerity. But I was sure the apparent emotion she displayed would impress the jury and I was about to tell her so when somebody at the other end of the corridor began to scream. The corrections officer outside our room hopped off his stool and ran off.

It was as if we’d been sucked into a vacuum, as if we’d stolen the privacy and now had to make use of it. I was standing at the time, leaning forward with my thighs against the edge of the table. As I continued to stare into Priscilla’s gray eyes, I was seized by an urge to yank her up out of the seat, to press my mouth against hers, unzip her jumpsuit, run my hands across her body. She wouldn’t resist, I was sure of it, but that wasn’t the point. I knew it would be a descent into madness. And not the delusional world of the paranoid schizophrenic. There would be no voices to whisper in my ear; I would not conjure demons or angels from the empty air. Instead, I would achieve the perfect clarity of the psychopath, would seek no higher good than personal satisfaction: Priscilla’s small breasts beneath my fingers, the slap of her teeth against my tongue, the nearly unbearable pleasure as I pressed between her legs.

I turned before I could act, took a step away from the table, then spun to face her. “Show me the scars again,” I said. “The burns. Show me the burns and tell me again how you got them.”

She smiled, then, her fingers rising to the zipper of her jumpsuit, sliding it down to her waist. “Byron thought I was skimming profits,” she told me as she unhooked her bra. “He couldn’t face the fact that we were doing so much coke there weren’t any profits to skim. “The raised weals between her breasts were white and smooth. They looked, to me at the moment, like the paired eyes of an insect. “What Byron would do, in the early days, is buy an ounce, throw in four or five grams of cut, calculate the profit if we sold it all. Then he’d pull out a gram, snort it, then pull out another. Most of the time he was so stoned he couldn’t keep track and when the ounce was gone and we didn’t have the money to buy another, he’d blame me.”

“And you were completely innocent?”

“Not exactly, Sid. Remember, the profits were going up my nose, too.”

L
ATER THAT AFTERNOON, AFTER
a long soggy walk from the garage to my office, I sat down before a desk piled with notes and began to search for the name of the man who referred me to Priscilla Sweet. Though I’d been trying to remember his name since leaving Rikers, I could only recall that I’d neither recognized the individual when Priscilla first named him, nor been surprised by my failure. A good deal of my life had been lost in the fog of cocaine and alcohol that preceded my collapse, a fact I’d learned, of necessity, to accept. I did, however, recall being a lot more interested in Thelma Barrow’s five thousand dollars, and Priscilla’s publicity value, than in the identity of some nothing client I’d most likely fobbed off on a subordinate.

It was only as I sat in my car, watching the guard stationed on the Rikers Island side of the Hazen Street Bridge search my trunk, that I’d reviewed the question in the light of something Rebecca Barthelme had told me a week before. Rebecca had insisted that Priscilla, while refusing an offer of pro bono representation, had asked Rebecca (and the Women’s Council) to stay close in case I didn’t work out. At the time, I’d asked myself why Priscilla would choose me instead of the Women’s Council with its deep pockets. The more pertinent question was why Priscilla had chosen me at all.

I was interrupted in my search twice. The first time by Pat Hogan who informed me that an IRS inquiry had produced no record of a safe deposit box in either Byron’s, Priscilla’s, or Thelma Barrow’s name.

“Look, Sid,” he concluded. “I paid a fortune to get the search done in a hurry. If you still wanna go forward, I’m gonna need a lot more cash.”

I told him to come by later that night for a discussion of how much and what for, then hung up. A few minutes later, the phone rang and I picked it up to hear Thelma Barrow’s thin voice offer a tentative, “Sid?”

For the next several minutes I listened to her alternately tell me how sorry she was for everything, and that she was still afraid of me. I told her not to worry. “It’s done and we have to go on.” The good news was that she wouldn’t have to face me, at least not right away. “My co-counsel, Rebecca Barthelme, is preparing defense witnesses. You come in the day after tomorrow, in the morning. I’ll make sure I’m somewhere else.”

“Thank you, Sid. And I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry.”

Fifteen minutes later, I was kneeling before a filing cabinet stuffed with folders, looking for the records of a man named Peter Howard. The name, when I’d finally dug it out of my notes, had evoked no memories. I couldn’t remember Howard at all and was on the verge of concluding that Priscilla had invented him, when I came upon his file half buried between Grabosky and Green.

Whatever relief I might have felt at verifying Howard’s existence vanished when I read the paperwork. Five years before, Peter Howard, having been charged with the criminal sale of a controlled substance in the third degree, had retained the famous mob lawyer, Sidney Kaplan, to defend him. The prosecution, according to notes in my own handwriting, had offered an excellent deal: criminal sale in the fifth degree, a D felony. I’d advised my client to stand pat and we’d proceeded to a one-day trial after which a jury had taken all of fifteen minutes to find him guilty as charged.

Although I still couldn’t remember Howard’s face, I could, by then, clearly picture his back as a pair of court officers led him away. His back and the upraised finger he’d thrust in my direction.

Two days later, while Thelma prepared her testimony in my office, I drove out to the home of her next-door neighbor, Gennaro Cassadina, the only living witness to Priscilla’s kidnapping besides Thelma. The last time I’d seen Cassadina, he’d approached me in a yellow slicker, an umbrella thrust above his nearly shaved skull, and bragged of his sexual prowess. I’d listened to his drunken rant for a moment, then decided that even sober he couldn’t be trusted before a jury. Maybe, if I hadn’t been able to verify the report Thelma gave to the cops at the 107th Precinct, I would have come back to Gennaro, tried to work with him. As it played out, I’d simply dismissed his testimony as irrelevant. Dismissed it without actually hearing it.

Now, motivated by the need to fill several hours before my afternoon session with Priscilla, I drove down 164th Street, parked my car in front of Cassadina’s house, shouldered the door open. My expectations were decidedly low, but I do recall harboring some vague hope of being entertained.

“Yeah?” The woman who opened the door was close to fifty. Blond, heavy-boned, and devoid of makeup, she wore a man’s white shirt, tails out, over faded jeans.

“My name is Sid Kaplan.” I retrieved a card, handed it to her. “I’m an attorney and I’m looking for Gennaro Cassadina.”

She held the card at arm’s length while she read it. “You the lawyer for next door?” she finally asked.

“I’m Priscilla Sweet’s attorney, yes.”

“Well, better come on in.” She held the door open for me, waited until I stepped inside and shucked my overcoat. “I’m Jenny Cassadina. My father somehow involved in this?”

“Maybe. According to Thelma Barrow, your father witnessed an incident about a year ago …”

“Lemme stop you there.” She rolled her eyes toward the ceiling. “Right now, as we speak, I’ve got my father’s act pretty cleaned up. But I’m tellin’ you flat out, Mr. Kaplan, he doesn’t remember a whole lot about the last couple of years.”

She walked away from me, then, into the living room where her father sat in front of a gigantic television set. On the set, a very cute, very sexy young woman was urging viewers to leave AT&T for MCI. Before she could finish her appeal, Jenny Cassadina snapped the set off.

“Pop,” she said, “this is Priscilla Sweet’s lawyer. You know who Priscilla Sweet is? Your neighbor, Thelma Barrow’s daughter?”

Gennaro had gained weight since I last saw him, his face swelling from skeletal to merely gaunt. His hair had been cut, too, and his face smoothly shaved. Beyond that, he looked absolutely miserable, an ex-drunk without the consolation of Alcoholics Anonymous.

“I’ma no dead yet,” he declared.

His daughter looked at me, again rolled her eyes, then stalked into the kitchen.

“Fuckina bitch,” he whispered to me once the kitchen door was safely closed. “You got a drink?”

“I don’t drink, Mr. Cassadina. That’s because I’m a drunk.”

“Me, too,” he admitted. “And I’ma no wanna die sober.” His stick-thin legs were crossed at the knee; his hands, resting in his lap, washed each other relentlessly. “So, whatta ya doin’ here?”

I told it as a story, setting time and place, beginning with Priscilla’s unexpected arrival, ending with Byron dragging his wife across the lawn. “Now, according to Thelma Barrow, Mr. Cassadina, you were standing there when Byron came out of the house with Priscilla. You saw him force her into a car.”

He continued to stare at me, as if he’d fallen asleep and forgotten to close his eyes.

“Yes? No?”

“I don’ know. Maybe it could’a be. I can’t say.” His head waggled on its stalk of a neck, describing something between a nod and a shake.

“Do you remember any of it? Even vaguely?”

Now his head was definitely shaking. “But that don’t mean it dinna happen. These’a days, my memory, she’s soft as my dick.”

The response, as far as I was concerned, was definitive. I got up, reached out to shake his hand. “Well, I had to try.”

“This Byron, he’s a fuckina spook, right?”

I ignored the slur, answered with a nod.

“Because it’sa kinda funny. See, Joseph, he no fuck around. One time, he take me into the house, show me thisa big gun. Then he say, ‘That nigger mess with me, I’ma kill him.’”

Late that night, I rewrote the small list I’d taped to my desk, adding and revising as I went along, until I was satisfied with the result. The list now read as follows:

1. Thelma Barrow files a false report with the local cops.

2. Joe Barrow dies.

3. Priscilla kills Byron.

4. Priscilla leaves just enough cocaine in the apartment to support her claim (to Guzman) that the cops stole the bulk of the drugs.

5. Priscilla has her mother pay $5,000 to retain Sidney Kaplan, a lawyer she believes to be an incompetent drunk, while keeping a well-heeled, pro bono attorney in reserve.

6. Priscilla’s apartment is burglarized.

7. Priscilla takes protective custody.

8. Thelma tells Guzman that she gave his money to Sid Kaplan.

9. Thelma disappears.

10. Sid is threatened.

11. Caleb dies.

12. Julie dies.