Bad Lawyer (7 page)

“Very nice, my dear. Very, very nice.”

I pulled a standard Power of Attorney form out of my briefcase, slipped the key into my pocket, and pushed the form across the table. Without hesitating, Priscilla bent her head and began to fill it out. “I loved Byron,” she said. “Or I loved some of him, bits and pieces. Or I maybe I just liked getting beat down.” Her voice was as matter-of-fact as the pen moving from space to space on the form. “The thing with Byron was that he was doing too much coke, staying awake for days at a time. The whole thing got out of hand.”

I glanced at Caleb out of the corner of my eye. He was clipping his fingernails with a little clipper attached to his key ring, his studied indifference a clear indication that his gentle ministrations weren’t needed.

“You’ll forgive me, Priscilla, if I say you don’t appear to be in mourning.”

She curled the right side of her lip into a bow, tilted her head slightly as she looked up at me. It was a smile, one I would become thoroughly familiar with, that held back more than it revealed.

“This is Rikers Island, Sid. It doesn’t pay to be soft.”

I stood up and began to pace. “Is that what you’re gonna tell the jury? That it only
looks
like punching a hole through Byron’s chest means less to you than stepping on a cockroach? That deep down you still love him?”

“It’s the cocaine that really frightens you, isn’t it?”

I ignored the question. “Remember, it’s up to us to prove you killed Byron in self-defense. The prosecutor will be the one trying to supply reasonable doubt. Plus, juries are mostly too stupid to follow what witnesses actually say. They rely on manner, like they were at home watching television. If you come off as the ice princess, it makes our job a lot harder.”

“Then I guess I’ll have to practice crying.” She took out a Newport, lit it up. “Maybe I can find a sympathetic bull dyke to let me lean on her shoulder.”

Caleb cleared his throat, the sound bursting into the little capsule Priscilla and I had created, startling us both. “Speakin’ of that cocaine, Priscilla,” he said. “Where was it when the cops came in?”

“In a suitcase in the bedroom closet.” She tapped the ash from her cigarette loose, watched it drop to the dirty tiles on the floor.

“Now, see …” Caleb began.

“Wait a second.” I cut him off with a shake of my head. “The apartment was leased in your name, right?” I stopped, waited for her to nod. “That’s presumptive evidence that you, in fact, possessed the cocaine. The jury hears that, they’re gonna convict unless
we
prove it belonged to your husband, that you were a virtual prisoner in that apartment, that …”

She jerked her head to the left, exposing the bruise covering the right side of her face. “It
was
Byron’s cocaine and I
was
a prisoner.”

I reversed my chair and sat down, straddling the seat. “Tell me about the period between your leaving prison and Byron’s parole. You report to your parole officer?”

“The first Monday of every month.”

“Ever miss an appointment?”

“Never.”

“You have a job?”

“Yeah.” She took a hit on her Newport, curled her lip into a smile, the quick flash of anger disappearing as if it had dropped into a bottomless well. “Tucker Trucking in Maspeth. The owner’s a guy named Paulie Gullo. I worked in the office.”

“And what did you do there?”

“A small business like that, you do a little bit of everything, from payroll to bullshitting creditors about the check being in the mail. And you’re always four jobs behind.”

“Think you could make me a list?”

“Sure. I’ll do it tonight.”

“Okay,” Caleb broke in. “Let’s get back to the …” He chuckled manfully. “… the scene of the crime. How long did it take the cops to get there? After the shooting I mean.”

“About twenty minutes.”

“And the first cops to arrive, they were in uniform?”

“That’s right.”

“Tell me what they did, as best you can remember.”

She dropped her cigarette to the floor and ground it out. “The first thing they did, when I answered the door, was push their way inside. I can’t say I offered much resistance, but they definitely didn’t ask permission. Then they saw Byron and one of them—the white cop—pulled out his gun while the other one checked Byron’s pulse. When they were sure he was dead, they asked me what happened. I told them I wanted to exercise my right to speak with an attorney before questioning.”

“Bet that made ’em happy.” Caleb was nodding and grinning at the same time.

“One of them, the one with the crewcut, I don’t remember his name. He said, ‘If it was self-defense, there’s a possibility you could walk away from all this. But you gotta tell us what happened.’”

“And what’d you say?”

“I told him he should take his possibilities and stick ’em up his ass. That’s when they cuffed me and took me into the hallway.”

“They didn’t search the apartment?”

“The skinny one, his name was Rodriguez, he went back in.”

“How long did he stay inside?”

“A few minutes, then he came back to wait for the detectives.”

“And the detectives? Did they ask you questions?”

“Not at first. They spoke to Rodriguez, then went into the apartment. About a half hour later, they came out with the coke.”

I laid my arms on the back of the chair and leaned forward. “Lemme see if I’ve got this right. The cocaine was in a suitcase in the bedroom closet. The uniforms didn’t find it. The detectives searched immediately upon arrival, without getting a warrant. That about it?”

“Yeah.” She lit another cigarette. “Is that good for us?”

Actually, it was good and bad. Good because the search was patently unconstitutional, bad because any effort to have the cocaine suppressed would amount to a trial in itself.

“It depends on whether or not the cops tell the truth,” Caleb explained. “Most likely, they’re gonna lie and say the cocaine was out in the open, which makes it admissible. And the judge is gonna take their word for it.”

The news didn’t seem to bother my client. Priscilla nodded thoughtfully, as if she’d already considered the possibility.

“It’s no joke, Priscilla.” I dropped my bully persona (just for a moment, of course) and spread my hands. “What a jury’s likely to do is acquit on the top charge, convict on the lesser, and think they’re doing you a favor. Meanwhile, if the judge is in a bad mood on sentencing day, you can spend almost as much time in prison for the coke as you can for the murder.”

I don’t know what I expected—fear, maybe, or outrage—but Priscilla’s expression didn’t change. I remember thinking, at the time, that her eyes were pewter coins, that they betrayed nothing at all. Even as they probed the fuzzy matter inside my skull.

“Then you’ll have to get me acquitted.” She dropped her hand down onto her lap, the smoke rising from her cigarette to momentarily veil her features. “Why don’t we talk about bail? Is bail a possibility?”

“A possibility, sure. It depends on how much and what kind of publicity we get between now and when you’re arraigned.” I stood up, my bad attitude back in place. “But the thing is, Priscilla, I don’t see what good it’s gonna do you. I mean, where will the money come from? Being as your sainted mother told me five grand was all she had in the world.”

This time, Priscilla’s smile was genuine, an appreciation of the trap she’d sprung on herself. “I love you, Sid,” she said. “I love you to pieces.”

“That’s fine, just
fine
,” Caleb said, “but will you still love him tomorrow? When some women’s organization with deep pockets offers to represent you?”

“It’s already happened. The New York Women’s Council spoke to my mother right after …” She paused for a moment. “Right after I was arrested. They offered me a lawyer, but I turned them down. The last thing I need to worry about is my attorney confusing the issues.”

I began to close my briefcase. “Couldn’t agree more. Anything else I should know?”

She stepped back, out of the guard’s view. Her left hand rose to the zipper at the top of her jumpsuit and pulled it down to her waist. Then she unhooked her brassiere, allowing her breasts to fall into their natural set. Between her breasts, two raised weals, each the approximate diameter of a lit cigarette, leaped into focus, as glaring as headlights. “Ace in the hole, Sid,” she said. “Ace in the hole.”

T
HE RAIN HAD STOPPED
by the time Julie and I got on the road the following morning, a Sunday, but the clouds still hung just above the tops of the tallest buildings, a solid gray mass echoing the concrete and stone below. The roads and sidewalks were almost deserted at eleven o’clock in the morning, typical of January in New York when the good citizens, after the Christmas-New Year frenzy, seem to draw back into their shells, adopting a puritanical work ethic punctuated by the occasional televised basketball game and the
New York Times
crossword puzzle.

We were heading for an interview with Thelma Barrow and her neighbor, Gennaro Cassadina, after a stop at Mount Hebron Cemetery to visit the graves of my parents. We drove out to Mount Hebron, Julie and I, at least once a month and I know Julie enjoyed these trips. With no positive family experience of her own, she accepted (and, to an extent, envied) the obvious bond. Me, I had my doubts. At times I entered that graveyard with my heart pounding in my chest. As if David and Magda Kaplan might rise up through the earth, point accusing skeletal fingers: “Where were you when we needed you?”

The literal answer—I was filling my nose with cocaine—was at least obvious. Not so obvious (to me, at least) was why I went to Mount Hebron in the first place. Maybe my visits were inspired by Magda’s search for her family, a case of the mother’s sin being visited upon the son. Maybe I was also destined to chase ghosts.

That was my favorite rationale. It had a poetic ring to it and at least a grain of truth. But the answer was probably much simpler. Like every out-of-control addict, I’d spent my life filling the empty spaces with drugs; like every sober addict, I needed to fill those spaces with something else. And I needed to recover the past as well.

The word repentance is too Christian for my taste. The guilt I felt was grasping and greedy. I knew there was a debt to be paid, knew also that I hadn’t even managed a down payment. I couldn’t, of course, make things right with my parents; they were dead and I’d missed my chance. But I hadn’t had any luck with my son either, despite the fumbling attempts I’d very self-consciously made to bridge the gap between us. That was because, unlike my partner Caleb, withdrawal from cocaine and alcohol hadn’t affected my basic personality. As competitive, opinionated, and generally unlikeable as ever, I was only at home in the company of survivors, like Caleb and Julie, who’d been so far down it required no more than a slight tilt of the mind to drop over the edge into oblivion. Who’d somehow decided to fight their way back to life, to resurrect themselves.

Mount Hebron Cemetery, in Flushing, is relatively small by New York City standards, and the graves are set close together. Bounded on the west by the Van Wyck Expressway and the Grand Central Parkway, the relentless whine of rubber on asphalt overlays the headstones like an auditory shroud. Still, despite the lack of atmosphere, I never found it empty of mourners. Unlike many Jewish cemeteries, set in pockets of the city long deserted by the communities that built them, Mount Hebron lies on the western edge of a thriving, mostly orthodox, Jewish neighborhood.

My parents’ shared grave was set in the middle of the cemetery, and Julie and I walked to it without hesitation. The first thing I did was pick a small rock off the pathway and lay it on the footstone, an old Jewish custom the meaning of which I’d long ago forgotten. I remember Julie, as she came to stand alongside me, silhouetted against the gray sky in a hooded coat that fell almost to her ankles. Her gloved hands were curled into black crescents as she knelt, then ran a finger along the Hebrew letters that spelled out my parents’ names.

“My father loved my mother,” I told Julie after a brief silence. “He pursued her relentlessly. I think he wanted to fill the empty spaces in her heart, but, of course …Anyway, in David’s life there was Magda and there was work. And not the store, either. He didn’t give a damn about the store. For the generation that came of age in the Depression, work was sacred, an obligation, a rite. And my father was good at it, Julie. He survived the Depression, survived the post-war exodus of Lower East Side Jews. He survived long enough to die in his store, at age fifty-three, as he was marking down a rack of sport jackets.”

Julie rose to her feet. “What’s the point?” she asked.

“The point is that it’s time to go to work.” I took Julie’s arm and began to walk back toward the car. It wasn’t really cold, but the air was damp enough to produce a semicircle of drops on the edge of her hood. We passed a group of Hasidic men as we came out onto Main Street. They strode by us, their manner purposeful and certain, their beards seeming to float in the light breeze.

“Your mother outlasted him,” Julie observed as he got into the car. “He wanted to protect her, but she outlived him by fifteen years.”

“I said he
wanted
to fill her heart. I didn’t say that he succeeded.” I slid behind the wheel, started the car. “The truth is that she froze him out. He tried, but she froze him out. After that, the store was the only thing he had left.”

Julie leaned over to kiss me on the cheek. “You’re forgetting somebody,” she told me, “and you know it.”

“Yeah,” I admitted. “I know it.” The somebody, of course, was the boy who’d worked summers and weekends in the store. The somebody was David Kaplan’s son. The somebody was me.

“Home sweet home,” Julie said as I pulled to the curb in front of a two-story frame house on the south side of the road and shut down the ignition.

“Does have that look to it,” I admitted. Though it was the middle of winter, it was easy to imagine Thelma’s small yard in bloom. Azaleas and rhododendrons ran along the front of the house, skipping over a red brick stoop. The azaleas, low-growing and well-trimmed, were set beneath the windows, while the taller rhododendrons stood with their backs to the white vinyl siding that covered the house. A trellis, interlaced with the green, fingerlike stems of a climbing rose, framed the walkway between the sidewalk and the front door.