Bad Lawyer (8 page)

Inside, in the living room where Thelma led us, it was much the same. The furniture was strictly department store, Macy’s by way of A&S; it looked to have been purchased in the fifties and as carefully maintained as the family heirlooms of a tenth-generation WASP.

“I baked cookies.” A wide smile elevated the two deep lines that ran from the top of Thelma’s nose to the corners of her mouth, revealing what had once been a pair of fetching dimples. “Butter cookies. They’re still warm.”

She set a tray on the table and began to pour coffee into gold-rimmed cups. “Help yourself.”

After a sip at the coffee, I dutifully bit into one of the cookies. It tasted like a dog biscuit.

“Of course, I don’t use sugar,” Thelma said. “Not with my diabetes. And I don’t believe in those chemical sweeteners, either.” She was wearing a cashmere sweater over a wool skirt, the outfit considerably more valuable than the raggedy coat she’d worn to my office.

I swallowed manfully and nodded my head in agreement. “The cookies are … unique.”

Julie dipped the one she held into the coffee, the act carrying a certain desperate quality that had me smiling as I set down my cup.

“Thelma, I want you to tell us what Priscilla’s life was like before she met Byron. And I don’t want you to exaggerate.” I crossed my legs, raised a lecturing finger. “Remember this—if you get up on the witness stand, say Priscilla graduated first in her class, you
must
have report cards to back it up. If you don’t, the jury won’t believe you. They’ll think you’re lying to protect your daughter. And if they think you’d lie about something small, they’ll decide you’re lying about everything else, too.”

Thelma sniffed once, her bird-bright eyes all but closing, then muttered, “Okay, I understand,” before getting down to business.

The Priscilla Sweet who emerged seemed a fairly ordinary child, neither Queen of the Prom nor Ugly Duckling. Her strengths were a quick, vivacious smile (demonstrated in a half-dozen snapshots) and a general enthusiasm for life. She’d done well at school, had various boyfriends, spent her summer vacations flipping hamburgers at the local McDonald’s. After high school, she’d gone on to Columbia University and was holding her own when she met Byron Sweet. Byron, according to Thelma, had filled Priscilla’s head with “black communist ideas,” telling her the university was a tool of the oppressor class, that the revolution was on the way and she’d better get her act together.

“It came so fast,” Thelma explained, “so fast. They were married and living in a slum before Joe and I could do anything about it. Then came the drugs and … and the rest.”

The rest, which I had to force out of her, was cocaine and marijuana dealing and a prematurely born child who died within a week of his birth.

“Byron blamed it all on the system. He thought being black gave him the right to do any damn thing he wanted. And that included beating his wife. The time he took Priscilla out of the house, he kept saying, ‘White bitch, white bitch.’ Over and over again.”

I interrupted before Thelma’s recitation descended into pure diatribe, reminding myself that there would almost certainly be blacks on the jury, that race would be an issue, that a hung jury would result in a second trial and we couldn’t afford the first.

“Okay, why don’t we cut to the confrontation between Priscilla and Byron, the one you witnessed. You can begin with the time and day she knocked on the door.”

As Thelma described the incident in detail, her angry facade began to peel away. For the first time, I was able to see her pain, to see the helpless, bewildered mother unable to protect her child. That was the side she was going to have to show to the jury and I was more than pleased to know it existed.

Byron’s assault had taken place about a year before. Priscilla, who’d showed up on Thelma’s doorstep one night, had been so badly beaten (according to Thelma) that she couldn’t speak above a whisper. Not that Thelma needed to hear an explanation.

“Well, I guess I knew what happened, didn’t I? Priscilla wouldn’t go to the hospital, wouldn’t let us call the police. I made up an ice pack with a plastic bag and some towels, then Joe and me, we put our daughter to bed. It feels funny to say it like that—she was thirty-three years old, after all, and not a little girl—but that was the way it felt. Like she was a two-year-old and needed tucking-in so the monster in the closet wouldn’t get her.”

“But the monster did get her.” Julie’s voice was flat. She was looking down, watching the palms of her hands make slow circles, one against the other.

“Byron got in through a bedroom window. I’m sure it was locked because Joe was very careful about locking the windows at night, but somehow … Anyway, Byron marched into the kitchen, and knocked Priscilla off the chair. ‘White bitch, white bitch.’ I couldn’t believe what I was hearing.”

Thelma’s faucets were full on, now, the tears running almost continually as she dropped her face to her hands. “Joe tried to help her. He picked up a chair and was holding it over his head. I had the phone in my hand, ready to call 911. Byron was standing behind Priscilla with his right arm around her throat, shouting, ‘I’ll kill the bitch. I swear I’ll kill the bitch.’ He was crazy, out of his mind. His eyes were rolling in his head like he was having a fit.”

She sniffed up her tears, her lips tightening as she pulled herself together. “It was chaos,” she continued, “and so unexpected. Byron appeared out of nowhere and we didn’t understand about violence.” Her eyes flicked from mine to Julie’s. “Joe had a heart attack two months later. From what happened is what I think. Byron took his daughter, and Joe couldn’t stop him. That’s all Joe ever talked about.”

The only response I could think of—don’t worry, your daughter got even—seemed inappropriate, so I changed the subject. “Did Priscilla say anything to you? Did she ask for help?”

“She couldn’t. He was choking her.”

“So you just let him go?” I waited for her to nod, then continued. “Where does the neighbor come in, Mister Cassadina?”

“Byron dragged her out through the front door. She was fighting him, but he was too strong. Gennaro was walking his dog near Byron’s car. He saw it all.”

“Did he try to do something? Try to intervene?”

“I think he wanted to, but there’s not much you can do when you’re eighty. And you know how those people are built. Byron looked like a …” She took a deep breath as she censored herself, then gave me a defiant look that bordered on triumph, as if she’d won some important point. “Like a bear. He looked like a bear.”

“Did you report this incident to the police?” Not for the first time that afternoon, I congratulated myself on leaving Caleb at home.

“I certainly did. I went down to the 107th Precinct that very day and spoke to Sergeant Shannahan. He works in the Domestic Violence Unit.”

“And he said …”

“He said he’d make a report, but unless Priscilla filed a complaint there wasn’t much he could do. Not with Byron living in Manhattan.”

“What about the burglary?”

“The what?”

“You said Byron broke in through a window.”

“I said,
probably.
Nothing was actually broken.”

“All right.” I looked around for an ashtray, found none, considered using the cookie dish, but settled for drumming my fingers on my knee. “I take it Priscilla didn’t want to file a complaint. Is that the way it went?”

Thelma began a complicated explanation of the phone calls that flew back and forth in the week following the assault. Myself, I tuned out after the second sentence. Given sufficient preparation, Thelma would make a powerful witness, especially if Shannahan had filed a report that substantiated her account. That would be true even if Gennaro turned out to be an incontinent drooler.

“Thelma,” I said when she paused for breath, “there’s two things I want you to do now. I want you to call Gennaro, ask him to meet me outside, show me where he was standing when Byron dragged your daughter to the car. Then I’d like you to get some of Priscilla’s things together. Report cards, if you have them, graduation pictures, preschool finger paintings …”

“I understand, Sid.”

“Good.” I waited until she was standing, before springing the bad news. “But there is one other thing we need to talk about. You remember our conversation yesterday? When I asked you why Priscilla took her husband back after he was released from prison?”

“Yes.” Her tone was wary, as if she’d been ambushed once too often.

“Well, the problem is that unless we get a woman on the jury who’s been abused by her husband—and the prosecutor’s going to do everything in his power to see that doesn’t happen—there’s only one way to make the individuals charged with judging your daughter’s guilt or innocence understand.” I stopped, smiled, waited for a grudging nod. “We’re going to have to find a psychologist, preferably a woman, to take the stand and explain it. It doesn’t really matter what she says. Her purpose is to give the jury an out.”

Thelma rose to her full height and folded a pair of thin arms across a narrow chest. “And this psychologist? How much will she cost?”

“Very good, Thelma.” I bowed in respect. “Figure thirty-five hundred for a hired gun with minimum credentials. Ten grand for a tenured Harvard Medical School professor with six or seven volumes to her credit.” She started to say something, but I waved her off. “We’re a long way from trial. For now, it’s just something else to think about.”

I watched Thelma cross the room, disappear into the kitchen. Then I turned to Julie.

“Thelma’s your witness from now on. It’s up to you to get her ready. I don’t want to see her until a few days before the trial. Assuming it comes to that.”

Julie took a second to think it over, then nodded. “I don’t see a problem.”

“What about the way she pronounces the word
black
?”

“That’s for our benefit, Sid. Thelma’s too smart to think she can get away with it in front of a jury. By the time we go to trial, she’ll be ready to swear that she and her husband welcomed Byron into the family, that they were looking forward to grandchildren. This I promise you.”

I got up and pulled on my coat. “Good enough. I’m going to interview the neighbor. Maybe I’ll have a smoke at the same time.”

The air outside had the texture of borscht. I pulled up the collar of my Burberry trench coat (mine, like the rest of my wardrobe, only because secondhand clothing had no resale value) and lit up a Camel. The smoke I blew out hovered in front of my face for a moment, as if trying to decide whether to rise or fall.

A few minutes later, Gennaro Cassadina stumbled out of his house. Tall and gaunt, the mottled skin of his cheeks was broken by tufts of inch-long gray stubble. He wore a yellow slicker, a matching yellow hat that fell back over his collar like a fireman’s helmet, and a pair of unbuckled galoshes that rose to his knees. The enormous red umbrella he held above his head seemed almost obscene against the gray landscape. Especially in light of the fact that it wasn’t raining.

I watched him stagger across the lawn, arms and legs flapping against the slicker like trapped snakes, and felt a moment’s sympathy. Then he got within ten feet and the distinct odor of almonds washed over my face. It took me a second to realize that I was smelling his breath and the first thing I thought of was cyanide. But Gennaro wasn’t poisoned, he was pickled, the smell of almonds not derived from cyanide, but Amaretto.

“I’ma niney-faw year old,” my witness shouted after bringing his raggedy bones under control. “And I’ma still getta laid. Fucka you.”

J
ULIE AND I WERE
sitting in the living room, watching
60 Minutes
when Caleb returned just before eight o’clock that evening. He was carrying a doggie bag filled with Ettamae’s peppered short ribs (thus saving us from our third pizza that week) and a carefully folded newspaper.

“You read the
Sun
this afternoon?” he asked without preamble.

“I was going to,” I replied, “but I couldn’t see the print through the clouds.”

“Never met a lawyer who could resist a bad joke,” Caleb said, depositing the newspaper in my hands before heading off to the kitchen. Julie and I, already salivating, followed closely behind. I sat down at our tiny breakfast table and spread out the
The Harlem Sun,
New York’s largest black-owned newspaper, while Julie went for a jug of lemonade and three glasses.

The prevailing mood was clearly one of celebration and there was a time when the lemonade might have been champagne or bourbon, preceded (and followed) by several lines of white powder. One day at a time, that’s the theory, but some days are much easier than others. At that moment, I felt a rush of fierce desire, felt it roar up through my arms and into my face. It was a sensation I’d experienced many times, usually in dreams, and I knew (or hoped) that if I waited a few minutes, it’d go away.

Julie filled a glass and set it down in front of me. Then her fingers rose from the glass in a languid arc to caress my cheek.

“Ya know, Julie,” I said, “I really hate it when you read my mind.”

She sat down next to me and jabbed a fingernail into my ribs. “Macho Sid. Gonna do it all by himself. You ever stop to consider that someone else in the room might be feeling the same thing?”

Caleb dumped the ribs into a glass pie dish, shoved the dish in the microwave, and shut the door. “Forget that AA bullshit for a minute.” He was clearly annoyed, his small mouth a black line between walrus cheeks. “Read the goddamned paper, Sid. Page four.”

I dutifully opened the tabloid, finding the story in question at the bottom half of the page. It bore the clever headline:
NO JUSTICE, NO PEACE FOR BYRON SWEET
.

“Read it out loud.” Julie was leaning into the refrigerator, gathering the ingredients for a Caesar salad.

The story, an interview with Reverend Mathias Silverstone, an ordained Presbyterian minister whose flock included Sebastian and Rose Sweet, parents of Byron Sweet, was straightforward enough. Mathias intended to preach a sermon denouncing the fact that a black man had been shot down in the prime of life and the white-owned media were preparing to exonerate his killer before the trial had even begun.