Bad lawyer, p.1
Bad Lawyer, page 1
Bad Lawyer
A Novel
Stephen Solomita writing as David Cray
For Otto Penzler who came looking, twice
Contents
Prologue
Part I
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Part II
Sixteen
Seventeen
Eighteen
Nineteen
Twenty
Twenty-one
Twenty-two
Twenty-three
Twenty-four
Twenty-five
Twenty-six
Twenty-seven
Twenty-eight
Twenty-nine
Thirty
Thirty-one
Thirty-two
Thirty-three
Thirty-four
Thirty-five
Thirty-six
Thirty-seven
Thirty-eight
Thirty-nine
Forty
Prologue
THIS IS A BOOK about love. Ferocious love, jealous love; love that excluded all but the lovers, love that reserved the traditional virtues of duty and honor to itself alone. I know I’m putting the cart before the horse, beginning my final argument before presenting the evidence, but questions of guilt or innocence are without meaning here, a point that needs to be made early on by a man already judged.
There were three lovers in this triangle, a curiously asexual menage à trois that maintained itself through a tyranny of memory, a pure terror of the past. We had no real leader, though I, with my personal narcissism (not to mention my fuck-you attitude) was the most obviously visible. But I was never, as some have suggested, the puppet-master, not with coconspirators as tough and powerful as Caleb Talbot and Julia Gill.
I begin, naturally, with myself, Sidney Itzhak Kaplan, third generation American Jew, born in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, in the year 1944, raised in Sheepshead Bay, also Brooklyn. My paternal great-grandfather, Hyman Baruch, hit these shores in 1879, along with his young wife, Esther, and quickly set up housekeeping in a basement room on Norfolk Street in Manhattan. Unable to find steady work, Hymie became the proverbial wandering Jew, loading his rented wagon with everything from pots to perfume to spectacles, working the towns of New Jersey and Pennsylvania, absent (so I was told again and again) for months at a time.
My grandfather, Itzhak (who lived in our house after his wife, Ethyl, died) was born in 1898, the last of nine children. By that time, Hyman had moved his family to the relative splendor of an old-law tenement on Hester Street. The family—mother, father, and six surviving kids—lived in the second and third of four rooms. The last room, the windowless cube at the end of the line, was reserved for the cutting and sewing of shirtwaists. Summer and winter, a huge stove in the front room glowed red-hot to keep the pressing irons heated. My grandfather carried a thick, rubbery scar on his left arm, a souvenir of that stove.
In 1899, a year after my Grampa Itzy’s birth, his father disappeared. Itzy’s brother, Nathan, the oldest at sixteen, was dispatched to find him. What Nathan found was a grave outside the town of Tranquility in northwestern New Jersey, and a story about a Jew kicked in the chest by his horse. Nathan, ever the good son, dug up the body in an effort to make an identification.
“Sidney,” Grampa Itzy told me six decades later, “the stiff’s shirt was made by my own hands.’”
Grampa Itzy, who’d been less than a year old when his father disappeared, had tiny, black eyes that glowed whenever he leaped into hyperbole. The next part of it, though, had passed into history; it was believed absolutely by dozens of assorted aunts, uncles, and cousins. “Even with all the decay, Nathan could see they had shaved our father’s head. Also the beard. The beard was missing.”
As time went on, the children married and moved out. Grampa Itzy was the last to go, marrying Ethyl Pearlman in 1920. By that time he was already the proud owner of a men’s clothing store on Grand Street between Orchard and Ludlow.
“I was famous up and down the Lower East Side. A macher, yes, but also a mavin with a needle.” At this point he would raise his tea-glass to his lips, the gesture at once coy and calculating. “For Meyer Lansky, I made all his suits. Also for Albert Anastasia.” Then he’d sip, swallow, lower the glass to his lap. “In them days we was all the same. The Jews, the Italians, it didn’t make no difference. You got a little money, you wanted to look good.”
My father, David Baruch Kaplan, was born in 1921, the first of three children, the others girls and married off just after Pearl Harbor. David Baruch, in the great patriarchal tradition, was given the family business on a platter. He was brought into the store at age ten, his fortune supposedly made, only to crash, head-on, into the Great Depression, his patrimony amounting to a decade of twelve-hour days in a nearly empty store.
The experience soured him, left him bitter and cynical, unable to enjoy the lucky accident that finally brought prosperity. Drafted into the army shortly after Pearl Harbor, David broke his leg in basic training, a piece of good fortune that left him with a slight limp and a jump start on the rest of his generation.
My father and grandfather were angry, belligerent men, as am I. They had excuses; I don’t. Yet, in what was fast becoming the family tradition, I fought my way through high school, psychologically as well as physically, a touchy kid left to stand alone by the schoolyard fence. My best (and only) friend was a Catholic school boy named Vinnie Barrone who spoke out of the side of his mouth, an act of homage to his convict father.
My summers were spent in the store, sweeping the floors, dusting the mannequins, stocking the shelves, though my father made it clear that I would never walk in his shoes. Or sell them, either. “Sidney,” he told me on the day after my bar mitzvah, “the Lower East Side is going to the dogs.” By which he meant the Puerto Ricans. “And I don’t have the energy to move the business. Besides which, the department stores’ll ruin us in the long run no matter what.” He shook his head, leaned back against a free-standing counter piled with shirts. “What I’m gonna do is put away enough money so that me and your mother should be comfortable in our old age. But you, Sidney, you gotta find another way.”
My way, though I couldn’t have spelled it out even while it was happening, was Brooklyn College (at the time free and predominantly Jewish), then Brooklyn Law School on a scholarship. I graduated third in my class, a lanky, scowling young man who yearned for the courtroom, for combat, for a test of wills that could be measured by words like guilty and innocent.
Two weeks after being admitted to the bar, I went to work in the Manhattan D.A.’s office, passing from gofer to the elite Homicide Unit to private practice in less than seven years. Over the next twenty-plus years, I represented some of the worst criminals in New York, low-and high-level mob figures, drug dealers with briefcases full of banded hundreds. I had the Rolex, the pinky ring, the 450SL, the co-op on Central Park West, the summer house on Fire Island. I had a suite of offices on Broad Street in lower Manhattan, a stable of hard working subordinates who didn’t object to my stealing the glory, the kind of celebrity that brought a table at the Four Seasons without suffering the indignity of phoning ahead for a reservation.
Then it all went bad, seemingly overnight, though I now realize the process took several years. From my clients’ point of view, the decline meant no more than Sid Kaplan loses cases, that defendants defended by Sid Kaplan not only go to prison, but (as Sid Kaplan is personally hated by sentencing judges) routinely feel the weight of the proverbial thrown book. From my point of view, it was a soul and body destroying combination of alcohol and cocaine that allowed my fifty-plus body to work sixteen-hour days, seven days a week, that left me befuddled by the complexities of courtroom procedure. By the time I gave it up and went into rehab for a year, I was buying cocaine by the ounce, consuming it (along with quarts of Chivas) as fast as I could put it into my body, floating half the time, as high from the fatigue as from the drugs.
At first glance, Caleb Jesse Talbot, born in the town of Brantley, Alabama, in the year 1941, the only child of Zacariah and Rose Talbot, seemed an utterly harmless man. Under five-ten, more than three hundred pounds, the starched collars of his white shirts cut into his jowls, the edges disappearing under a wave of ebony flesh. He had eyes, Caleb did, that protruded (the result of a thyroid condition, so he insisted) as if pushed from inside by the double whammy of his collar and his tightly knotted tie.
I don’t know where Caleb went for the jackets he inevitably wore, but unlike his shirts, they somehow managed to accommodate his enormous shoulders and back, his equally enormous belly and ass, without buttons flying like sprinkled corn in a microwave. Similarly, his sharply creased black trousers fell smoothly over his buttocks and thighs, then dropped in a straight line to brush the tops of his tasseled loafers. Caleb had tiny feet and hands; his fingers were thick and of equal length, his square, pink palms curiously unlined. His face was unlined as well, the skin puffed out in a smooth, often rippling sheet that overpowered his small nose and pursed mouth.
Caleb liked to play the “good cop” to my “bad cop” whenever I needed to get the truth from my lying clients and their lying witnesses. He had a name for the persona he adopted at these times, calling it Uncle Zeke, after a Brant
Caleb could summon Uncle Zeke at will. I use the word “summon” because Uncle Zeke was not what Caleb Talbot’s life had been about.
The Talbot family rode north on the great wave of black immigration that followed WWII, settling on 168th Street near Amsterdam Avenue in the winter of 1951. Zacariah found work driving a bus for the Transit Authority while Rose hiked across the Alexander Hamilton Bridge each day to clean apartments in nearby Morris Heights. Caleb did well at school, excelled in athletics, had numerous girlfriends, managed to resist the temptations of the street. When he applied for the NYPD after a two year stint in the army, his record was squeaky clean. This was an absolute necessity, or so Caleb assured me, for a black recruit in 1963.
“They checked me good. Checked my record, in the Army and out, visited my neighbors, my high school teachers, lookin’ to sniff out any hint of a reason to dump my application.” A pause, then, followed by a grim smile. “Course, they missed the stranger. In those days, I never showed nobody the stranger.”
The stranger was Caleb Talbot’s name for the part of his being that craved alcohol, a specter that first came to perch on his shoulders after a high school party. Caleb had very broad shoulders, but the stranger was insatiable.
“It was like findin’ myself, that first time I tossed down a shot. You know, finding out who I really was. By the time I graduated, I was drinkin’ hard most every day.”
His capacity was apparently as great as his body, then a relatively svelte 220 pounds, because he survived the Academy, graduating third in his class, and was put out on the street a confirmed drunk. The NYPD sent him up to the big Three-O, the Thirtieth Precinct in Harlem, where he proceeded to run through his old neighborhood like typhus through a refugee camp.
“I liked to hurt,” he explained, “liked to use the stick, a sap, my hands, whatever there was. Nobody minded, my partners maybe thinkin’ I had a right, being as these were my own people I was hurtin’.”
Years later, while detoxing for the tenth and final time, Caleb finally realized that he was beating himself, that each blow he’d struck was a measure of just how much he hated the popeyed man he encountered each morning in his bathroom mirror. He described the intensity of the experience as “a blind man opening his eyes to see the sky, saying, ‘Hey, shit, man, the motherfucker really is blue.’”
Unfortunately, the vision that ultimately kept him sober didn’t show itself until Caleb was summarily dumped by the NYPD for assaulting a street mutt in full view of a community activist, the Reverend Casper Lewis. In retrospect, it could have been worse. Caleb might have assaulted Reverend Lewis; he was that drunk at the time. Still, he came within an eyelash of being indicted, saved only by yours truly after a long lunch with an ADA named Adrienne Paskit just before she went to the Grand Jury. I reminded her of the victim’s extensive criminal record, my client’s unblemished career, my intention to fight to the death if Caleb Talbot was formally charged.
It was a bluff. I was representing Officer Talbot pro bono (not through the goodness of my heart, let me assure you, but only because the court expected a certain number of freebies) and wanted him out of my career path as quickly as possible. So when the Grand Jury failed to return an indictment, I assumed it was a done deal, that Caleb and I were quits forever, but a year later, when he showed up at my office and asked for a job, I gave it to him.
At the time I had four lawyers and a gaggle of attractively turned-out paralegals and secretaries laboring in my offices. Being of a theatrical turn of mind, I loved to play the patron (when I wasn’t playing the tyrant). How better to exhibit the benevolence of my dictatorship than hire a fat, black, ex-cop/ex-lush to be my personal investigator?
I know little more of Julia Gill’s pre-Kaplan history than a single sentence uttered on a February night two years before this story begins. Caleb was there, perched on the edge of a club chair, his feet, like the skirt around the chair’s base, gently brushing the carpet. I was fiddling with the radio (our Trinitron was in the shop, awaiting the next inflow of cash), running through the stations in search of something vaguely resembling Monday Night Football. Julia was sitting on our leather sofa, feet tucked beneath her buttocks, arms crossed over a narrow chest. She seemed unusually tense, lighting one cigarette after another, but neither I nor Caleb chose to comment. There were times when Julia smoldered, when she seemed about to burst into flame, and we accepted her moods, as she accepted ours.
But this time she chose to speak, to give momentary voice to the demons flitting through her soul. “My father,” she intoned, raising her head, “began to pimp me off when I was eleven.” Then she looked from me to Caleb as if demanding the answer to a riddle.
I do know that Julia Gill was a heroin addict and a prostitute. I know that the veins running along the insides of both arms were brown ribbons of scar tissue, that she almost died in jail because she refused to accept methadone. She was my client at the time, my paying client. Her pimp, resplendent in a fur-lined satin coat that dropped to his ankles, had hired my firm because, as he openly expressed it, “I’ll get my money back five times over before I burn the bitch out.”
It was a nothing case and ordinarily I would have tossed it to one of the hirelings, but something in the pimp’s attitude ruffled my macho feathers. Julia had made two mistakes. First, she’d stolen a small statue from a trick’s limousine, a pre-Columbian statue of Aztec origin worth $35,000. Second, the victim was a bachelor, childless, and willing (even eager) to admit to his peccadilloes.
Two detectives had taken him on a tour of the various New York strolls and he’d identified Julia Gill as she walked a beat near the 59th Street Bridge. This after viewing hundreds of prostitutes in a half-dozen locations, thus rendering his identification truly impressive. Add his memory of a scorpion tattooed on the perpetrator’s left buttock that nicely matched the tattoo on my client’s left buttock and you have a case that cannot go to trial. Julia had been charged with grand larceny in the third degree, a class D felony punishable by up to seven years in prison, every day of which, the prosecutor assured me, she would receive if …
The rule is three strikes and you’re out. Julia had whiffed at two fastballs, but she’d gotten a hit on the final pitch. Instead of turning the statue over to her pimp or trying to sell it, she’d stashed it in the basement of a neighboring tenement. The insurance company, Manhattan Life, the largest in the city, wanted that statue much more than it wanted to avenge itself on a junkie-whore named Julia Gill. It was that simple.
Without consulting my client, I worked out two deals, both contingent upon restitution: six months on Rikers Island followed by probation; or successful completion of a drug treatment program at a residential treatment center followed by probation. The second offer seemed the obvious choice, but “successful completion,” as defined by the RTCs themselves, meant at least a year of wall-to-wall group therapy sessions under conditions equivalent to medium-security incarceration. And Julia Gill had been around long enough to know it.
Nevertheless, after a week of considering the alternatives (including going to trial), Julia took the RTC. I remember her as she appeared before the sentencing judge, spectral thin, her cheeks bruised gray by the pain of cold-turkey withdrawal.
“Your Honor, I’m sorry for what happened.” She’d drawn herself up to her full height, though her voice quavered. “I didn’t know the statue was valuable when I took it. It was just supposed to be …” Julia’s lashes were long and so blond as to be nearly invisible. They’d whisked over her slanted green eyes like feathers. “Just something to have, I guess. Something to take with me when I left.”
I remember willing her eyes to drop to the toes of her shoes. I remember whispering, “Bow your head.” I remember Julia’s sharp chin slowly falling onto her chest, the bemused smile she hid from the judge.
It was a performance worthy of the Little Match Girl, a masterful performance, even if a bit on the pro forma side. Julia knew the statue was valuable (as she knew the exact nature of her sentence), that’s why she’d hidden it away instead of displaying it on a shelf. Nevertheless, this was her chance (her only chance) to rise above the back-room plea bargaining, to assert an individual self, and she took it.
