Bad Lawyer (36 page)

“Your mother,” I told Priscilla at one point, “is blowing it.” Priscilla thought about that for moment, then turned to me and whispered, “Well, she was ripped off last night.”

“C’mon, Priscilla.” I struggled to keep my own expression neutral, to keep from laughing at my own punch line. “What could your mother have lost that’s more valuable than the next twenty-five years of your life?”

Sgt. Patrick Shannahan, head of the Domestic Violence Unit at the 107th Precinct in Fresh Meadows, followed Thelma to the stand. After establishing the basics, that Shannahan had received a complaint that included allegations of kidnapping and assault, then jammed his written report into a filing cabinet and left nature to take its course, Rebecca tore into him. Why, she wanted to know, was there no investigation? Did he, Patrick Shannahan, consider kidnapping a minor crime? Or was that the official policy of the New York Police Department? If Priscilla Sweet had been kidnapped by a stranger instead of by her husband, would the police then have acted? Or did the police need a ransom note first? Or a dead body?

Rebecca continued to pound away until Judge Delaney stopped her with a polite tap of the gavel. “Your point is made,” he told her. As indeed it was. Priscilla had tried to escape, but the police had let her down. I would ask the jurors to imagine themselves trapped in a downtown tenement, subject to attack at any time, hoping for rescue. Just as if the entire incident hadn’t been manufactured.

Maybelle Higginbotham, in a lavender gown with puffy shoulders and black velvet trim (as far as I knew, she was still trying to sell her life story), followed Shannahan to the witness box. Invited by Rebecca to explain her statement to the 911 operator,
I think the boy done killed her this time
, Maybelle told the jury, over a series of thundering objections, that she’d heard Byron shouting and Priscilla screaming on many occasions, felt ominous thuds and bangs against her bedroom wall, had seen Priscilla bruised and cut, had been told by Priscilla that her husband had inflicted the injuries. In theory, these responses went to Maybelle’s state of mind at the time she’d made the call and were not offered for the truth of the matter. In fact, they served to establish a consistent pattern of abuse from the time Priscilla was kidnapped until the night she pulled the plug on her husband.

I kept up an almost constant patter as the day’s witnesses presented their testimony, leaning over to whisper into my client’s left ear. I commented on individual jurors, our various witnesses, Judge Delaney, and especially Carlo Buscetta. “Look at him,” I told Priscilla as Carlo made a desperate attempt to rehabilitate Sergeant Shannahan. “That’s the face of a loser, a guy who cries himself to sleep at night. See Delaney? That bored look? He knows it’s over, too. Only the jury’s still interested.”

And, indeed, individual jurors continued to study Priscilla as if she was a puzzle piece left in the box. Their scrutiny forced her to maintain a rigid control over her expression, her posture. I remember that she sat with her legs pressed together under the table, back and head bent slightly forward, that her lower lip trembled when Maybelle described the bruises on her face, that her jaw came up and her mouth tightened when Shannahan (who, like Dr. Grace, had no independent memory of his role in the events preceding Byron Sweet’s death) tried to defend his inaction.

Despite the tension, Priscilla did very well, undoubtedly because she’d been thoroughly trained by a professional at the top of his game. Still, for the first time her gray eyes acquired sufficient depth to afford me a glimpse of the rage that lay there, motionless, like a snapping turtle on the bottom of a pond.

Delaney adjourned early that day, at four o’clock, and I left for Rikers Island at five, figuring to arrive just after Priscilla’s bus. But the rush hour traffic on the Drive was so bad I diverted to the 59th Street Bridge which was even worse. It was nearly seven when I parked the car, and after seven-thirty by the time Priscilla, wearing an orange jumpsuit, was brought down from her cell. She smiled when she saw me, a smile that didn’t come within light years of her eyes, and said, “Hey, Sid, you got a smoke?”

I tossed a pack on the table, watched her shake out a cigarette. Her movements were slow and sensual, as if she hadn’t a care in the world. I recalled the elaborate rationales I’d constructed over the weekend, the forced march I’d made through the streets of Manhattan, my plan to shake the confidence of Priscilla Sweet. The letters CFA came to mind, New York cop shorthand for Complete Fucking Asshole.

“Where did you lose it?” I asked her. “Did he beat the humanity as well as the shit out of you?”

She thought about it for a moment, her blank eyes fixed on my throat, finally shrugged and said, “I love my mother. That’s enough for me.”

I thought of my own mother as she floated through our kitchen, remembering, for some reason, that Magda had kept her fingernails long enough to slice neatly through the tops of envelopes. It was her only affectation.

“Your mother? I don’t think so. I think what you loved, Priscilla, was the money. The money and the cocaine.”

“I paid for that money,” she told me, her voice cold enough to raise goose bumps on the backs of my arms. “I paid in blood.”

“As did Byron and Caleb and Julie and those kids who were slaughtered when person or persons unknown took down Elizado Guzman. If there’s a point here, why don’t you explain it to me?”

“You’re the one who called this meeting, Sid. Remember?” She leaned back in her chair, raised her chin, blew a stream of gray smoke at the ceiling. “I’m the one in prison.”

“What I want,” I told her, though I didn’t know why, “is the truth. First, I want the truth.”

“And then? What do you want after you get the truth? My blood? Because I’ll tell you up front that I’m bled out. Byron got every drop.”

I let that go, let my eyes drift around the little cubicle though there was nothing at all to see. The space was as gray and blank as my client’s eyes. “Did you ever love him?” I asked. “Byron? Did you ever love him?”

The question brought forth a contemptuous smile. “Who knows, Sid? When I think about that time at Columbia, I feel like an archeologist studying a dead civilization.” The smile disappeared. “Next question.”

“Why did you take him back?”

This time her smile was genuine. “I hated that nine-to-five bullshit. You can’t imagine how much I hated it. Paulie Gullo would hand me that paycheck like it was a gift, like he was Columbus passing trinkets to the Indians. Just enough to pay the rent, of course, just enough to buy groceries, to put clothes on my back, to get me to work on Monday morning.” She crossed her legs, looked directly into my eyes. “The check was like dope, Sid. Like a fix. By the time payday came around, there was always some bill overdue. Friday nights, I’d be running to the bank instead of the clubs, trying to cover checks I’d already written. What kind of life is that?”

It was the kind of life I’d lived with Julie and Caleb, the kind of life I’d never live again. “You haven’t answered the question, Priscilla. Why did you take your husband back?”

She fiddled with the zipper on her jumpsuit, slid it down a few inches, then back up. “When I came out on parole, I was assigned to a parole officer named Adrienne Whetmore who should have been running a concentration camp. I never once visited her, not even after a year of producing pay stubs and testing clean, when the bitch didn’t threaten to violate me at the drop of a hat. I didn’t see any point in going back to prison, so I followed the party line.

“As for Byron, I started hearing from him just about the time I was coming off parole. I wanted to get back in the life, but I didn’t have any money. What Byron told me when I went up to see him was that he’d made a connection in prison, that he wanted me to help set it up before he came out on parole.”

I stopped her with a wave of my hand. “Why you, Priscilla? Why did Byron choose you?”

“Byron didn’t have any money, Sid. He’d arranged to have coke fronted, but he had to move it in a hurry. My job was to contact our old customers, get everything in place before the parole board cut him loose. Besides, like he told me again and again, ‘Baby, there’s no one else I can trust.’” She burst out giggling, brought her palm up to cover her mouth. “Ironic, isn’t it? Because I came into the deal intending to rip him off. Because I’d spent two years in Bedford Hills eating the pussy of a man-hating bull dyke who taught me everything I know about survival. Because I thought of Byron Sweet every time I pissed in Frau Whetmore’s plastic bottle, every time Paulie Gullo jammed his hand into my crotch.”

“Didn’t you know what Byron would do to you? Weren’t you afraid?”

“Are you asking me if I believed those letters?”

“Yeah.”

“The letters were for the parole board, Sid. What Byron told me, face to face, was that he was looking for a business relationship. He would purchase and I would sell.”

“And he would beat you up whenever the fancy took him?”

Though she continued to study me closely, Priscilla didn’t respond immediately. I met her gaze, told myself not to show fear, that animals and ex-convicts can smell fear, that fear provokes aggression.

“I was raised on pain, Sid,” she finally told me. “Good old Joe Barrow, he was smarter than Byron. He knew where to hit, how to conceal the bruises. By the time I got married, a slap didn’t mean all that much to me. I thought I deserved it.” She shifted in her seat as I continued to stare at her. Again, she seemed to be weighing her thoughts carefully, though whether in search of the right words to convey the truth, or to deceive, I couldn’t tell.

“I don’t think,” she finally said, “that I can make you understand, so let me put it simply. I was in the cocaine business where your life is always at risk. Byron was just another factor in a violent equation. True, there were times, though not as many as I’ve led you to believe, when I couldn’t handle him, but I wasn’t going anywhere, not while there was money to be made. That’s the deal I cut with myself going in. That’s the way it finally went down.” She smiled. “Of course, knowing I was gonna kill him made it a lot easier.”

She looked at me for a moment, still smiling. “You want to hear the ironic part? I needed to keep Byron stoned, so he’d lose track of the product and the money. But when he was stoned, of course, is when he was most dangerous. You wanna hear another one? I had to engineer the last attack, the one we’re using to justify Byron’s death. It wasn’t easy, Sid, because the poor fuck was halfway to dead at the time.”

In the cubicle alongside ours, an attorney, a woman, was trying to convince a reluctant client to accept a harsh plea bargain. As I listened, she told the hapless mutt, over and over again, “But you have no defense, Carrie. You have no defense.”

“You knew that Guzman would eventually turn to you for repayment,” I finally said. “That’s why you left the cocaine where the cops would find it. But when Guzman didn’t buy your story about the cops stealing the bulk of the shipment, you took protective custody and turned to your second line of defense. Isn’t that right?” When she didn’t respond, I continued, anxious now to get it out in the open. “Thelma deliberately pointed Guzman in my direction. That was why you hired me in the first place. I was the sacrificial shyster.” Again I hesitated, again she refused to respond. “It was a good story, Priscilla. Much better than your bullshit about the cops, which Guzman never believed. In fact, it was good enough to get Thelma off the hook, at least temporarily. And, of course, good enough to get Caleb and Julie murdered.”

I searched Priscilla’s gray eyes, looking for rage, fear, sorrow, for any hint of what she was feeling at that moment. But Priscilla was clearly beyond revealing any fragment of her inner life. “I paid,” she calmly repeated, “for that money. I paid in blood.”

“You could have saved them. You could have taken care of Guzman and still had enough to start a new life.” My own voice was trembling. I wanted to kill her and I wanted to run away and hide; I wanted to come over the table, take her throat in my hands, and I wanted to be at home, lying on my bed in the dark. All my life I’d been a control freak, convinced, even in my darkest moments, that I could pull myself together with an act of will. Now I knew, fully and for the first time, that I’d never been the one giving the orders, that my life had simply happened.

“When my mother took off, I ran out of options. Even if I wanted to, I had no way to get him the money.” Priscilla’s tone was matter-of-fact, her expression, if anything, even more relaxed. “That wasn’t part of the plan,” she declared, “leaving the money unprotected. But after she panicked, there was nothing more I could do.”

“Don’t bullshit me, Priscilla. You could have contacted Guzman. You could have called him on the phone, told him that I didn’t have his money, that I never had his money. You could have told him where the money was, given him the code to shut down the alarm, and invited him to pick it up. If you’d done that, Caleb and Julie would be alive. You didn’t and now they’re dead.”

I lit a cigarette, offered the pack to my client, let the silence build. A corrections officer walked by the cubicle, a young
latina
with a butt the size of a watermelon. She glanced at us as she passed, tossed me a hard look devoid of curiosity, then passed on by.

“Are we done with the confession?” Priscilla finally asked. “Can we get down to business?” She laid her cigarette on the edge of the table, ran her fingers through her hair, announced, “I’m getting sleepy.”

I ignored the comment. “How did you fix it?” I asked. “So that it looked like Byron was getting out of the chair? Did you provoke him? Did you put the gun in his face, tell him to get up?”

“None of the above,” she told me. Then she repeated, “None of the above.”

“Do you mean he was really in the process of attacking you?”

“No, I mean that his liver was hurting him and he was sitting on a cushion. I mean the cushion didn’t get any blood on it, so I moved it over to the couch. I mean I didn’t just sit around and wait for the cops to arrive.” She leaned forward, stared into my eyes, her sardonic smile firmly in place. “When I get out of here, Sid, I want to take you to bed, fuck your brains out.” She went on before I could interrupt. “Face it, you’re a bastard. You’ve always been a bastard. I didn’t set out to get anybody killed, anybody except Byron, but it happened and now it’s done with and I’m a bastard, too. What a couple we’d make.”