Bad Lawyer (9 page)

If Byron Sweet had been white and his wife black,
Reverend Silverstone was quoted as saying,
these same people would call for a lynching. It’s got to stop.

The reporter, Rachman Cousins, whose byline headed the story, stopped short of actually canonizing the dearly departed Byron, but he did list the names of four black women, battered one and all, whose claims of self-defense had been ignored by the media and rejected by a jury.

“That reporter ain’t lyin’,” Caleb said.

“If Byron’s a choirboy,” I insisted, “then Priscilla’s the Virgin Mary.”

Julie turned away from the counter by the sink and began to set the table. “What is it you want, Sid? You want to grab the brass ring, fly off into that madness? It didn’t do much for you the first time around.”

I think the question was supposed to catch me off-guard, but the truth was that I’d been considering the question all day. I got up and went to the refrigerator for a bottle of Louisiana Hot Sauce and a jar of salad dressing. Blue Cheese, if I remember right. “It isn’t the money,” I said, then looked defiantly from Julie to Caleb, daring them to contradict me.

“We know that,” Caleb said. “Julie wasn’t talking about the money. More like the thrill of it all.” He took the ribs out of the microwave and set them on the table.

“The thrill? Why not the
high
of it all?”

“Forget it, Sid,” Julie said. “Nobody’s trying to put you on the spot.”

I sprinkled hot sauce onto my ribs, took a bite, then wiped my fingers on a paper napkin. “I understand Caleb’s point, and he’s got it right. I’m never more alive than when I’m in that courtroom. Plagues? Riots? Wars? Julie, as far as I’m concerned, the only endangered human being in the entire universe is my client. The only war is in that room.”

Twenty minutes later, I was getting up to do the dishes when the phone rang. Julie answered, mouthed
Phoebe Morris,
and listened for a moment. “I don’t think that’s a problem. You wanna talk to Sid?”

I took the call in my bedroom. “Phoebe, it’s Sid. How goes it?”

“It’s deadline time. And
it
goes very slowly. Look, we’re running the photos in tomorrow’s edition. That’s the good news. The bad news is that we’re running your client’s rap sheet as well. Any comment?”

“I thought you already catalogued my client’s sins?”

“Well, we’re doing it again.”

“Did Buscetta give you an exclusive or did he mail a little package to every journalist on the east coast?”

“For the record, Sid.”

“For the record, I resent this effort to influence the course of justice before a single piece of evidence has been presented against my client in a court of law.” I could hear Phoebe’s fingers pound away at a keyboard. It’d been a long time since anyone had thought enough of my bullshit to actually write it down. “Off the record, are you going with
Byron’s
rap sheet, too? The one you received this afternoon from a protected source?”

“We’re saving it. In case the story has legs.”

“Does that mean your editors think it
will
have legs?”

“That means, Sid, that it’s up to you.”

I began the following day with a shower, four cups of coffee, and a brace of extremely productive calls. The first went to Carlo Buscetta, who referred me, after I asked permission to have my client examined by a doctor, to the Department of Corrections. The DOC, after shuttling me from clerk to clerk for thirty minutes, finally transferred me to a supervisor who announced that my request would be taken under advisement. With Priscilla’s bruises already fading, postponement was tantamount to refusal.

Satisfied, I hung up and redialed Carlo Buscetta’s number, hoping to catch him before he headed off to court. To my surprise, he picked up on the first ring.

“State your business, Sidney,” he said as soon as he heard my voice. “I don’t have time for any more bullshit this morning.”

“Then I’ll make it simple. I need to examine the crime scene.”

“So sorry, Mr. Kaplan, no can do. Priscilla Sweet’s apartment was burglarized last night. I’m told the place was torn to pieces.”

“And the chair? The one Byron was sitting in when he was shot?” I was hoping the chair had been damaged in some way that would make it inadmissible in a court of law. No such luck.

“The chair’s in an evidence locker,
Sid
ney. Where it belongs.”

Ten minutes later, I was in a cab heading for a safe deposit box at Citibank’s First Avenue and Fifteenth Street branch. The key my client had given me was no longer burning a hole in my pocket. That’s because it was burning a hole in my right palm.

The clerk in charge of the safe deposit vault was suspicious enough to take my Power of Attorney form to a supervisor who was suspicious enough to ask for identification. I think the supervisor, Annette Robbins, might have enjoyed refusing me, especially after I announced that the owner of the box was sitting in the Rose Singer Jail on Rikers Island. But when I promised her that if my client’s interests were in any way compromised by her refusal to allow me access, I’d respond with an aggressive, mean-spirited lawsuit, her managerial heart softened and she instructed the clerk to give me the box and show me to a “privacy cubicle.”

I suppose I should have opened the box slowly, savoring the mystery the way a bibliophile might savor a rare first edition. Instead, ever the
gourmand,
I tore the lid open, turned the box over, and dumped the contents onto the table. Two items tumbled out, a passport and a stack of letters tied with a white ribbon. I remember thinking, even as I opened the passport, that the ribbon was a nice touch.

The individual named on the passport was Morgan Paxton; the face in the small, ugly photograph belonged to Byron Sweet. Both of them had taken a trip to Panama a short time after Byron was released from prison.

I put the passport on the table and untied the letters. They were in sequence, with the earliest dates on top, written by Byron on prison stationary. For the next hour, I kept reminding myself that I was reading Priscilla’s version of her reconciliation with Byron. I had no way of knowing, for instance, if there weren’t other letters, perhaps dealing with the sale and distribution of drugs, that she’d chosen to keep to herself.

Despite my suspicions, a quick scan told me that Byron Sweet’s literary self-portrait, assuming I could have it put into evidence, would shed the best possible light on his and his wife’s post-prison reunion. Carlo would challenge any attempt to show the letters to the jury on two grounds. First, that they were hearsay, which, in fact, they were. Second, and more importantly, that they were irrelevant. I could overcome the hearsay problem by offering the letters as proof, not of the statements they contained, but of Priscilla’s state of mind when she received them. But how were they relevant to Priscilla’s claim of self-defense?

Nevertheless, the letters were my first real glimpse of Byron as human instead of monster. Previously, in a typical act of unconscious bias, I’d been imagining him as a hulking brute, had him alternately adding the words
bitch
and
whore
to every guttural command. Meanwhile, Byron Sweet’s letters were witty and sophisticated.

There were long passages describing his efforts to gain control of his temper and his life. He wrote of “adjustment therapy” sessions and the “need to repair the unalterable past.” Whole letters were devoted to the small pleasures he and Priscilla had once shared—foreign movies, a trip to Baja California, a sunset viewed from a Long Island City pier. Others remembered their shared sorrows. Their premature son, Jason, who’d died in an incubator four days after his birth. Byron’s twin sister who’d been killed in a wreck on the Cross Bronx Expressway, run off the road by a fifteen-year-old in a stolen car.

It wasn’t until I walked out of the bank, letters and passport tucked into my briefcase, that I fully understood the obvious fact that my client had begun preparing her defense long before the day she murdered her husband. Moreover, she’d had that key with her when she pulled the trigger, had taken the time to swallow it before the cops turned up. Looking back, I know the proper response on my part should have been fear, but what I actually felt at the time was admiration.

The air outside the overheated bank was sharp and cold. Overnight, a piercing north wind had pushed the rain out into the Atlantic, replacing it with a glaring winter sun that hung just above the roof lines on the southern side of Fourteenth Street. I was looking for a diner and lunch, but the first place to catch my eye was a small dark bar with a hand-lettered sign in the window extolling the virtues of its half-pound hamburgers. It beckoned to me like a whore from the mouth of a dark alley and I had a quick vision of myself holding a schooner of Bass Ale in one hand, a half-eaten burger in the other while a tenor sax, playing in the low registers, purred from the jukebox.

I listened to that sax for a moment, imagined Ben Webster’s lips curled around the mouthpiece; I heard it filter through the casual chatter of the pedestrians who moved around me, persistent and implacable. Then I moved on.

I
DROVE FROM CITIBANK
out to the Tucker Trucking warehouse on 56th Avenue in Maspeth. There I found Priscilla Sweet’s former employer, Paulie Gullo, and his two office workers, Iris Sanchez and Miriam Konig. They were, the three of them, pure New York, an Italian, a Jew, and a second generation Puerto Rican. Better yet, each of them confirmed my client’s story. After coming out of prison, she’d given every indication that she’d pulled her life together.

“Priscilla was never late,” Miriam Konig declared as she searched a file cabinet for Priscilla’s time cards. “And she never took a day off. Not until Byron came back into her life.”

“And she didn’t have an attitude, neither,” Paulie Gullo told me. “In this line of work, you gotta be ready to jump from one job to another. Routing, payroll, customers and creditors, vehicle maintenance. Priscilla could do it all, and she did.” He tossed Iris Sanchez a nasty look, then added, “Without whining.”

It was only after Byron’s release from prison that Priscilla began to change. “At first,” Miriam Konig told me, “it was okay. Byron, he was a funny guy, loved to joke around, and Priscilla, she was real quiet. It was like they just fit together.” Miriam was wearing a knit, chocolate-brown suit and a yellow blouse. No jewelry, no makeup. “But then, a couple months in, Priscilla showed up with a shiner and from there it was all downhill.”

I listened to this recitation of Priscilla’s fall from grace until Gullo and his workers began to repeat themselves. Then I took Paulie Gullo outside and braced him. “Paulie,” I asked, “did you grow up in Brooklyn?”

“Yeah,” he grinned. “How’d you know?” His head was completely bald on top, but he’d let his hair grow long on the right side, his intention, undoubtedly, to comb it back over his naked scalp. Unfortunately, the breeze had pulled the fringe loose and it hung over his right ear like the edges of a feather duster.

“Because it takes one to know one. I grew up in Sheepshead Bay.”

A sparkling green truck pulled up as we spoke. Gullo eyed it, then nodded. “Look, I gotta cut this short, get that load off.”

“Then I’ll make it simple. Were you fucking Priscilla Sweet?”

He tossed me a look of pure astonishment, then burst out laughing. “What’re you, a mind reader?”

“Something about your protective attitude led me to draw the obvious conclusion.” I waited until he shrugged, then asked, “Are you married, Paulie? You have kids?”

“All right, I get the picture.”

“You still want to testify?” Actually, I intended to call him no matter what he wanted.

“Will I be asked about …”

“Not by me.”

To his credit, Gullo considered the ramifications before he replied. “Yeah,” he finally said, “I’ll do it for Priscilla. I was crazy about her. She’s the only woman I ever met who knew anything about anything.”

My good mood carried me through the heart of Queens, from Paul Gullo’s warehouse to the far side of the Hazen Street Bridge where I popped the trunk as I slowed for the mandatory car search. A beefy corrections officer leaned into the window and looked the car over. “I know you,” he said after a moment. “I recognize you.”

“Yeah, I’m the guy who escaped last week. I miss the place and I’m trying to get back inside.”

I expected him to catch an attitude, which would have pleased me immensely, but he shook his head. “Uh-uh. You’re in the paper. Wait a minute.” He turned back to his kiosk, snatched a copy of the
New York Post
off the counter, began to thumb through the pages. “In Jay Harrison’s column. Your picture. Here.”

Sure enough, there I was, looking more than a little shifty, as I pushed my way through a mob of reporters. The photo appeared to be at least ten years old.

“You wouldn’t want to part with that?” I asked, gesturing at the paper. “Save me a stop on the way home?”

Jay Harrison, a columnist with the
Post
for as long as I could remember, had a dual reputation as a thinly disguised racist and a rabid law-and-order fanatic. I remember wondering which way he’d come down on this one. Would he take up the cause of a black wife beater? It didn’t seem likely. No more likely than his taking up the cause of the woman who killed the black wife beater.

When I finally got a chance to read Harrison’s column, fifteen minutes later after sending up for my client, I found that Harrison had a third predilection that I hadn’t considered. He simply
hated
defense lawyers.

The column was about Sid Kaplan. It named my famous (and notorious) clients, detailed their crimes without bothering to add the word
alleged,
revealed my problems with drugs, alcohol, and divorce without including my year of rehab.

Sid Kaplan reminds me of all those washed-up fighters I covered during my years on the sports beat. Dreaming of glories won and lost, of riding that roller coaster one last time. I, for one, hope Sid lacks the price of admission. He was that good in his prime.