Bad Lawyer (34 page)

Hogan brought the bottle to his mouth, took a judicious sip. “Wanna hear somethin’ else?” he asked. “Joey used to take his darlin’ daughter to a gun range in Middle Village. Story I got from the manager, Werner Bergman, the kid wasn’t a bad shot with a .38.”

I maintained my silence for a moment, remembering Priscilla’s insistence that she knew nothing about guns, had accidentally opened the cylinder on the revolver she used to kill Byron, thinking the cylinder release was a safety. Hogan unbuttoned his jacket, exposing the grip of an automatic beneath his right armpit, then rubbed his gut. “I’m fuckin’ torn up inside,” he complained. “I’m livin’ on Pepcid.”

I dropped my elbows to the top of the deck, looked at the bottle in his lap. “Price of the ticket, Pat. Take it from a reformed drunk.”

“Now you’re preaching?” He looked disappointed as he raised the bottle to his open mouth.

“Beg pardon. You were saying?”

Hogan stared straight ahead for a minute, stared unblinking at the window behind my back. “What it was was luck,” he finally announced. “The Long Island Expressway was terminal this afternoon. The worst I’ve ever seen the fucker when it was actually open. Or maybe it wasn’t open. Maybe they were taking the traffic off a couple of exits ahead. What matters is that I gave up on it, jumped ship at Main Street with the intention of working my way toward Northern Boulevard.”

“But Northern Boulevard was also jammed with traffic,” I said, my dinner turning in my stomach. “And you went to Thelma Barrow’s house which just happened to be in the neighborhood.”

“Wrong. What I did was go to the neighbor’s house. Gennaro Cassadina’s house. Figured I’d ask him if Joey kept a gun at home and not just in the store. Sometimes these gun freaks, their wives won’t let ’em bring a gun into the house. Maybe that was why Joey didn’t try to prevent his daughter’s kidnapping.” Hogan lit a cigarette with an old Zippo lighter, blew smoke in my general direction. “They were very nice to me, Sid. The daughter and the old man. Served me coffee and cake while Gennaro told me his life story. I was there maybe a half hour when the alarm went off in Thelma Barrow’s house.

“It took me a minute to realize what was happening, that it wasn’t an ambulance or fire engine. That’s because the Cassadinas didn’t react. They didn’t go to the window, check it out, didn’t even complain. When I asked them why they weren’t concerned, Jenny told me the alarm would shut off in a few minutes, that it had happened so many times in the past the cops didn’t show up anymore. The noise was a pain in the ass, but what could you do? An old lady without a husband in New York? You couldn’t blame her for taking precautions.

“I left the Cassadinas a few minutes later, walked right across the lawn and pretended to knock on Thelma’s door while I checked the house. There were no sensors on the windows, no alarm company sticker on the door and from what I could see through the living room window, no motion detectors in the corners. Sid, there’s only one other possibility for a home system and that’s pressure pads under the carpeting.”

Hogan stopped speaking long enough to drop back into the chair and cross his legs. He flicked his ash on my floor, looking thoroughly pleased with himself. “Installing pressure pads means ripping the carpet up, then putting it back down. It’s expensive which is why you never see it in middle-class homes. Plus, it lets an intruder into the house before it triggers. Most people wanna scare off the bad guys before they gets inside. The advantage is that the system’s invisible and burglars set it off before they even know it’s there. It’s also invisible to lawyers who come to interview their clients’ mothers. Lawyers who might put two and two together.”

He stopped abruptly, wriggled even deeper into his chair while I absorbed the information. “You’d think,” I finally said, “if Thelma could afford an expensive system, she could afford one that worked.”

“Rule of thumb in the precincts, Sid, more than two false alarms in a month, the cops don’t respond. That’s how bad most of these home systems are. Of course, you don’t know that until after you buy the system. Pressure pads, for instance, start out fine, but when you walk on them day after day, you throw off the calibration. Then you gotta rip the rug up to fix ’em, which is a major pain in the ass.” He took a drag on the cigarette. This time he blew the smoke over my head. “Cut to the chase, Sid. You want me to dig under that rainbow? You want me to go in, toss the house? It’s your call.”

I made the call without hesitation, though my mind was running in a thousand directions, my thoughts scurrying off like cockroaches beneath a descending fist. “Do it, Pat. Do it and get it done.”

“First, I gotta find a time.”

“For Christ’s sake, Thelma’s in court all day.”

“That’s the problem. All
day.
I’m not goin’ in while it’s still light outside. Too easy to be spotted.”

I thought it over, then said, “Thelma’s scheduled to testify on Monday. I’ll ask her to come into the office on Saturday afternoon to review her testimony. Thelma takes the subway back and forth—two subways, actually, and a bus from Flushing. Figure she won’t get home until eight-thirty. That give you enough time?”

Hogan nodded, ground the stub of his cigarette into an ashtray. “About the money, Sid. If I find it, what happens next?”

I’d flipped on the overhead fluorescent lights as we’d come through the door and now the fixture above our heads was buzzing softly. I looked up at it for a moment, made a mental note to replace the tubes. “What you do is you count the money,” I told him without looking down. “You count the money, then you tell me how much, then you disappear from my life.”

Hogan didn’t move a muscle. “I don’t think so,” he finally said.

“You don’t think what?” For a moment, I thought he was going to balk, to assert his cop scruples.

“You gotta take a piece, Sid. Understand?” He drained the inch of vodka in the bottom of the bottle, deposited the bottle on my desk, then rose. “If there’s money in that house, you gotta take a piece. I don’t wanna be in this by myself.”

I crossed the room, opened the door. As Hogan came abreast of me, he fired a parting shot. “An alarm system like that, you gotta figure it cost the better part of five grand. I mean I been all over Thelma Barrow’s finances and I know she didn’t take the money from either one of her bank accounts. Ditto for putting the bill on her only credit card.” He grinned happily. “Let’s be positive. Let’s presume innocence. Maybe she’s got a penny bank the size of a steamer trunk.”

I
GOT MY BODY
up the next morning, got it showered, shaved, and dressed, got it out of the office, onto a subway, and into the courthouse without mishap. It behaved very well, my body, didn’t once flinch away from its obligations, demanded a bare minimum of attention. Which was just as well because the rest of my attention, the larger part by far, was committed to a stream of words that flapped thorough my consciousness with the determined anarchy of bats leaving a cave at sundown. I told myself that an alarm system in the house of a Queens widow, even an exotic system, didn’t prove that the crown jewels were buried under the foundation, that it made perfect sense for an elderly widow to protect herself in bad old New York where personal jeopardy was an article of faith. It wasn’t her fault that a salesman had sold her a bill of goods.

I told myself the scenario that had Priscilla setting up Byron’s murder shortly after the death of her father was absurd on its face. It insisted that she accepted Byron’s punishment, endured attacks that clearly threatened her very life for nearly eight months before pulling the trigger. Why would she do that if she’d already stolen enough to warrant her mother’s purchase of an expensive alarm system? Why?

Even beyond the pain, if Thelma had purchased an alarm solely to protect her daughter’s loot, then mousy little Thelma was a co-conspirator. She’d not only known that her daughter was a thief, she’d known, at the very least, that her daughter was going to put a permanent end to her marriage. Had Thelma encouraged Priscilla to stay the course, persist until the sky, in the form of Elizado Guzman, finally began to fall? Did she put an arm around her daughter’s shoulder, say, “C’mon, Priss, it isn’t that bad. Nothing a dab of liniment won’t fix. Remember, personal fortunes are made through sacrifice. No pain, no gain”?

As the day passed, I kept rearranging these ideas. Or, better still, they rearranged themselves, adding a bit of dialogue here, subtracting a hypothetical there, the unspoken (and actually stupid) assumption being that precise wording and perfect order would somehow reveal a tangible truth. At no time do I remember fearing that Pat Hogan would be caught in the act, a distinct possibility. Nor can I now recall, with any degree of accuracy, the course of the trial on that Friday. My general impression, at the time, was that Rebecca did very well. I can visualize her white hair flowing down over the collar of a light blue jacket and I can hear her voice working in the low registers as she examined this or that witness. But when I look at the transcript, read the Q&A line by line, it’s as if my knowledge of the day’s events came to me in two minute chunks on the six o’clock news.

Rebecca began our case by leading Dr. Kim Park, our forensics expert, through a concise recitation of his formidable credentials. Then she had Byron Sweet’s bullet-scarred chair and a mannequin pierced with a quarter-inch wooden dowel brought into the courtroom. Park used these exhibits to prove that Byron had not been sitting when the fatal shot was fired. “The dowel,” he explained as he plopped the model into the chair, “follows the bullet’s path through Byron’s torso exactly. It will not line up with the bullet hole in the back of the chair if the model is placed in a sitting position. If, however, the mannequin is raised several inches, like so, then tilted forward, dowel and hole line up perfectly.”

Carlo’s cross-examination, centered on Park’s botched analysis of a crime scene more than eight years before, lasted until the noon recess. The tactic, obvious to any courtroom veteran, was a common one. The defense wanted to pile witness on witness, to overwhelm the jury with a fusillade of cumulative evidence. The prosecution, unable to effectively discredit that evidence, could at least nullify the basic strategy by putting the jury to sleep. If, in the process of delay, Carlo and Isaiah aroused the ire of Judge Delaney, as they knew they would, each could drop his shoulders, turn to the jury with a pained expression and a tight, narrow smile, play the prosecutor victimized by technicalities. All the while hoping the jury wouldn’t blame them.

After lunch, it became clear that Isaiah was going to follow the pattern of delay established by his boss. He began by challenging the qualifications of Dr. Arthur Goldbaum. Goldbaum, with more than two decades of emergency room experience, was in court to convince the jury that very high levels of inebriation do not preclude the possibility of aggression, the highly visible scar on his own forehead being tangible proof. Isaiah, with some justification, pointed out that Goldbaum had never participated in any scientific study, had never published in any scientific journal, and had written no books. His testimony was therefore anecdotal in nature and should not be presented to a jury as expert. Delaney, with no real choice, sent the jurors off to cool their heels while he conducted a full hearing.

About a half hour into the hearing, with Goldbaum testifying and arguments still to come, I realized that Thelma Barrow would not take the stand before Tuesday morning. At the earliest.

Five minutes later, I was hunched over a pay phone in the hallway, listening to Pat Hogan’s answering machine request the favor of a message. At the beep, I dutifully introduced myself, getting as far as “Pat, it’s me,” before Hogan picked up.

“Hey, Sid, whatta you doin’ out of the courtroom at two o’clock in the afternoon? They find your client guilty?”

I quickly explained the situation, finishing with, “I can’t find a good reason to drag Thelma into Manhattan on a Saturday if she’s not gonna testify until Tuesday. So what I’ll have to do is bring her in after court on Monday.”

Another lie, a lie buried in truth. Beyond all considerations of Thelma Barrow’s comfort, beyond any fear of rousing her suspicions, I was afraid of what Pat Hogan would find in that house, afraid that I’d have to do something when I wanted to do nothing.

“You know, Sid,” Hogan said, “you might wanna think about lettin’ it go. I mean what’re you gonna do if I find what you’re lookin’ for? I was Caleb’s friend, too, and the way I see it, neither one of us has a lot of options. Plus, you might wanna consider that if Priscilla capped her old man for money, she might be willing to do the same to her lawyer.”

I shook my head at the phone, muttered what I believed to be an irreducible truth. “I gotta know, Pat. Whether I do anything about it or not, I gotta know.”

“What could I say? I’ve been there a time or two in my life.” He sighed into the phone. “Might as well look at the bright side, pretend the goddamned glass is half-full. Maybe ripping your client off will be enough. One thing for sure, this is a woman who really cares about money.”

I might have chosen that moment to put my thoughts to the test, might have laid my exculpatory scenarios before Hogan, absorbed his inevitable refutations, but I don’t recall even considering the possibility. Instead, I hung up and returned to the legal fray.

Beyond a sharp glance as I took my seat, Priscilla maintained the demure courtroom demeanor we’d worked so hard to perfect. She was wearing a green, long-sleeved dress with a bit of lace at the cuffs, a bit of ruffle at the throat. Sitting with her legs crossed under the table, her hands folded in her lap.

Arthur Goldbaum was lounging in the witness box, trying not to yawn while he listened to Rebecca Barthelme tell Judge Delaney that twenty years of emergency room experience, twenty years during which her witness had dealt directly with tens of thousands of inebriated patients, counted for more than the odd article published in the odd scientific journal. Goldbaum wasn’t there, she declared according to the official transcript, to make an assessment of Byron’s condition on the day he was killed. No, Dr. Goldbaum’s purpose was to counter testimony introduced by the prosecution through the medical examiner. In fact, she casually informed Delaney, if the prosecution was willing to stipulate that Byron was perfectly able to mount an attack on the day in question, the defense would dispense with the witness altogether.