Bad lawyer, p.17
Bad Lawyer, page 17
“I’ll be ready, Sid. Whenever you need me.”
The tone of the incoming calls changed during that endless, empty afternoon. People who’d known Caleb began to phone with their condolences. I was caught off guard the first time, as if the solicitous voice on the other end of the line was driving a nail into Caleb’s coffin. As if the muttered sentence, “I’m sorry,” made Caleb somehow more dead.
Everybody wanted to know when and where the funeral would be held. The when, of course, depended on the medical examiner who could, according to law (and if he had the space), hold the body until the end of time. The second question was answered by Ettamae who called just before three. The family, she explained without preamble, was determined to bring Caleb back to Brantley, Alabama, to bury him alongside his parents. I was welcome to come down, join the mourners, even share in the post-burial feast, but the peculiar relationship Caleb and I had developed over the years did not confer rights of any kind.
“I spoke to Miss Vera Benton,” Ettamae explained, “Caleb’s first cousin. I told her about you, Caleb, and Julie. I don’t think she got past the part about roommates.”
“It’s all right, Ettamae.” I could see Caleb’s family spread out on the wall as I spoke, see each and every smiling face, and the small white church in the background of so many of the photographs. “You going?”
“If I can scare up the money.”
“That’s no problem, Ettamae. Caleb had a little cash in a savings account. Not much, about five thousand dollars. He told me if anything happened to him, he wanted you to have it.”
It was a lie, a small act of generosity. Caleb had no money, had, instead, a closet filled with designer clothing.
“Shouldn’t that money go to his kin?”
“It was a joint account, Ettamae, with my name on it, so if you don’t take the money, I don’t think I’m gonna be able to resist temptation.”
The calls tapered off as the afternoon progressed, finally stopped altogether about four. Six o’clock came and went, with no call from Guzman, then seven, then eight. I’d like to report that time slowed down, that the minutes and seconds attained the individuality of descending knives, but I believe what happened is that in some important way, my mind (not to mention my heart) went numb. I know, for sure, that I should at least have called Benny, asked him to stay in place, and I never considered doing so.
If I’d remembered to lock the outer door I might have sat that way forever, a dusty figure in a secondhand chair behind a secondhand desk. As it was, at ten, when Harold Knapp finally strolled into my office, I didn’t jump, didn’t move at all for a moment or two. I recall Knapp slowly unbuttoning his coat to reveal a neatly pressed gray suit, a fresh white shirt and a red tie. His eyes were bright now, the dark shadows beneath them faded to a smoky beige.
“I just come from the scene of a multiple,” he told me. “Up in the Heights.” He took the chair in front of my desk, fixed me with a familiar childish stare. “About a block from where your buddy got hit. Way I read it, the main target was a mutt by the name of Elizado Guzman, but they slaughtered everybody in the apartment. The kids, everybody.”
He stopped abruptly, began to rummage through his pockets, finally produced a business card, one of mine, and tossed it on the desk. “I’m really not supposed to do this, being as the card’s evidence and all, but I thought you might wanna take a look. I mean, it came out of Guzman’s pocket, so it’s gotta be important, right?”
I remember pulling myself up at that point, a long process that began somewhere in my bowels. “What do you want, Knapp?”
He responded, in typical cop fashion, with a question of his own. “How come you’re in the office so late? You got an appointment?”
“The clock’s ticking.” I met and held his stare.
“Nine dead, Kaplan. Four males, three females, two children. I got a fucking right to ask what your card was doin’ in Guzman’s pocket.”
“I don’t know. And I don’t want to know.”
“You don’t wanna know?” His voice jumped a full octave. “And I suppose you don’t wanna know if Julia Gill was one of the victims?”
I think the question was supposed to shake me. After all, I hadn’t told Knapp about Julie being missing. But there were a dozen ways he could’ve learned about Julie, a dozen friends and enemies who’d have been more than happy to tell him. “If she was, I’m sure you’ll let me know.”
Knapp stared at me for a moment, mouth slightly open, eyes empty of all expression. He loathed me, I was sure of it, but he wouldn’t show his feelings. He wouldn’t give me the satisfaction. “Counselor,” he said as he picked up my business card and headed for the door, “I’ll be in touch. Count on it.”
I went for a walk before lunch on the following day, up to Macy’s, where I killed a half hour fingering ties and sport coats, then walked directly back, as if afraid I was going to miss something. The phone was ringing when I unlocked the door of our Third Avenue apartment, but I don’t remember hoping it was Julie, despite understanding that if she wasn’t part of the slaughter, she might well be alive. It wasn’t Julie, of course; it would never be Julie. The voice on the other end of the line belonged to Jay Harrison from the Post. “On the record, Kaplan,” he said. “What was your business card doing in the pocket of a murdered drug dealer? And what did Elizado Guzman have to do with Caleb Talbot’s death?”
Too depleted to trade quips, even with an asshole like Jay Harrison, I hung up without answering. Not that I actually escaped. The red light on the answering machine in my office was flashing rapidly. I made an effort to count the calls, stopped after the eighth blink and simply pressed the replay button. Harrison was there, along with six or seven other reporters, including Phoebe Morris.
I remember sitting at my desk for a long time after the machine reset itself, staring at the now steady red light. And I remember thinking that if Julie was alive, she would have called, that I ought to take the phone off the hook, avoid the media until I prepared a useful comment. But I couldn’t do it, not that night or any other night for weeks to come. Each time the phone rang—and it rang every fifteen minutes for the first few days after the massacre—I felt that pressure in my chest, like a fist pushing against my diaphragm, as I raised the phone to my ear.
The contradiction, looking back, is obvious. On the one hand, I declare myself to have been without hope. Yet whenever I heard the phone ring, I also heard Julie’s voice. In defense, let me say that the head can decide whatever it wants, that the heart makes its own decisions. In its own good time.
I spent that night floating back and forth between Julie’s and Caleb’s bedrooms and my own room, packing my clothes in fits and starts. We had a convertible sofa in the office and that’s where I was going to sleep until I was done with Priscilla Sweet. I would never again willingly enter our home.
As at my mother’s house in Sheepshead Bay years before, I became a ghost in search of ghosts. I wandered from room to room, opening drawers, handling the most mundane items as if I’d discovered them in the tomb of an Egyptian pharaoh. As if Julie’s brush and comb, her lipstick and powder, had a significance beyond all but the most intuitive understanding.
The phone rang again and again and again. Phoebe Morris called at one point and I told her, for the record, that Elizado Guzman had come into my office a few days before, that we’d discussed the possibility of future representation, that he must have taken my card at the time.
“Is Julie around?” Phoebe asked when I’d finished my statement.
“No.”
Her voice softened. “Off the record, Sid. Are you expecting her?”
“Every minute.”
Phoebe didn’t press it, but I think she recognized the fact that I’d used every instead of any. “When it’s over,” she said before hanging up. “I want it all.”
“When it’s over,” I answered, just as if I could imagine an ending, a conclusion, a line that could be drawn, much less crossed.
Twenty-one
A PSYCHIATRIST (A DRINKING buddy, not my therapist) named Milton Morton once told me that I ran on momentum. “You get up a head of steam, Sidney, get it all in motion. Then you have trouble stopping.” This after an hour of my ramblings on how the corrupt inner nature of the criminal justice system mirrors the corrupt inner nature of humanity in general.
I thought of Milton as I set up housekeeping in my office the next morning. Milton had been a thoughtful man, calm and deliberate, traits that hadn’t prevented his taking that midnight leap from his bedroom window one fine spring night. I remember going to his funeral, tossing a handful of earth onto his coffin, wondering if this was the fate of a man who’d lost his momentum, who’d rooted himself in reality, who’d given himself time to think.
The first thing I did after closing the door behind me was hang the photos of Caleb’s and Magda’s respective families on opposing walls of my inner office. Then I took the crumpled paper on which I’d written the list of Priscilla’s actions and the questions those actions had raised, and taped it to my desk. Finally, I unpacked my clothes, hanging what could be hung in our smallish closet, leaving the rest in a suitcase which I slung on top of the filing cabinets.
Satisfied, and purposeful for the first time since Detective Knapp entered my life, I went back to my desk and made a series of reporter-punctuated phone calls. The first went to a customer rep at NYNEX who instructed his computer to have calls made to my apartment automatically forwarded to the office. The second went to an employment agency called NowStar where I arranged to have a legal secretary, a woman named Wendy Houseman, and a paralegal named Janet Boroda, sent over on the following morning for an interview. Then I called Rebecca Barthelme at her office, got put on hold, and finally cut off when I took an incoming call from a “Hardcopy” producer named Jason Weinstein. (“I’m talkin’ bucks here, Kaplan. Big bucks.”) Ten minutes later, when I finally reached Rebecca, she wasted no time getting to the heart of the matter.
“You need to talk to Priscilla, Sid. Before we discuss the case.”
“Does that mean you’ve already been to see her?”
“Under the circumstances …”
I let her go without reacting, punched in the number of a PI named Patrick Hogan. A retired cop, Hogan had been Caleb’s partner for the six years preceding Caleb’s abrupt resignation from the NYPD. We’d had him to dinner maybe a year before, had watched him pump down a pint of Dewars in the course of the evening. He was a short man with a broad face dominated by a fleshy, drinker’s nose. His brown eyes were set extremely close together, giving him the look of a startled bird even when he was so drunk he could barely stand.
Hogan recognized my voice before I announced my name. I arranged to meet him at seven in my office. To his credit, he didn’t push me, didn’t beg for details, simply asked, “This about Caleb?”
I said it was, hung up, went to Caleb’s desk, and spent the next couple of hours rummaging through Julie’s files. I was half expecting Priscilla to call, wanted to make sure she’d receive me at Rikers. When she didn’t, I got up to leave and nearly tripped over a large unmarked box. Curious, I opened it and found the police reports Judge Delaney had ordered Carlo to deliver.
I had to think a minute to place the date of Delaney’s ultimatum: Friday, February 15, less than a week before.
Two hours later, after fighting my way through an enormous traffic jam caused by a misplaced tractor-trailer wedged beneath an overpass on the Grand Central Parkway, I walked into an attorney-client room to find Priscilla already seated. Without greeting her, I took out a pack of cigarettes and tossed them on the table, waited patiently while she shook one out, lit it up.
“Sid …”
I turned my back, walked to the window behind my client, stared at the corrections officer on his stool. He was a skinny man with a large red boil near the corner of his left eye. As I watched, he gently rotated the boil with a fingertip.
“Sid, I don’t know how to tell you …” Again, Priscilla’s voice trailed off.
“It wasn’t your fault.”
“I wish I felt like it wasn’t my fault, that I didn’t have blood on my hands.”
The CO turned to look at me. His gaze, confused at first, became rapidly more challenging and I finally turned away. “We have a lot of work to do, Priscilla. There’s no percentage in playing the blame game.” I sat down, lit a cigarette, tossed the match on the floor.
“Look, Sid, under the circumstances …” She stopped, sent her dark hair flying with a shake of her head. “Shit, I don’t know how to say this.”
“Say what? That you don’t want me to represent you? That you’ve decided to go with the Women’s Council and Rebecca Barthelme, tap those deep, deep pockets? Or maybe that you’re afraid I’ll fuck it up deliberately, pay you back for Caleb and Julie?” I crossed my legs, straightened the crease on my trousers. “Because Julie’s not coming back either. Julie’s gone the way of Caleb.”
Priscilla’s face hardened as she sucked in a deep breath. “What I think, Sid, is that you’re too upset, that you need time to recover, deal with your grief.”
I smacked the tabletop with the palm of my hand. “Caleb and Julie, they’re gone. Now and forever. Me, I’ve got a life to live, the quality of which depends almost entirely on the outcome of this case. You dump me, I’m right back in the sewer. On the other hand, if I defend you successfully …”
“I’ve already made my decision.” She dropped the cigarette to the floor, stomped it out. “There’s no going back.”
“You sure about that?” When she didn’t answer, I delivered the essential message: “You dump me, I’m gonna hold a press conference, let the world—and the cops—know exactly what happened to Caleb and Julie. I’ll be punished for doing so, maybe even disbarred, but the way I see it, there’ll be enough money in the book I’ll write to make up for the loss of a dead-and-buried career. Meanwhile, Priscilla, what you’ll do is spend the next twenty years in Bedford Hills.”
She stared at me for a moment, then let her mouth expand into that familiar ironic smile. “You’re a hardass motherfucker, Sid. It’s not what I expected.”
“Tell me something,” I persisted. “Did you steal Elizado Guzman’s drug money?”
“No,” she quickly replied, “I didn’t.”
“Then you’re not to blame for what he did. As for Thelma and the lie she told? Well, what I did, last night, was put myself in her place. I pretended I was an elderly, middle-class woman living alone, that Berto Gomez showed up one day and threatened to grind my fingers into sausage. Would I have tried to push the problem onto somebody else? Without doubt. I would have done anything to get those men out of my house.” I paused for a moment, rolled the cigarette between my thumb and forefinger, stared at the rising smoke, finally said, “I want you to call Rebecca, tell her I’m your lawyer, that either she accepts her role or I find somebody else. And what we, you and I, are going to do between now and your trial, is prepare your testimony. We’re going to do it every afternoon for as long as they’ll let us hold onto the room. Remember, words alone won’t save you. The jury will read your body language, listen to the tone of your voice. If you want to walk away from all this, you’re gonna have to be perfect.”
She looked at me for a moment, her smile firmly in place, then nodded once. “My mother’s coming home tomorrow. You might wanna go over there at some point, calm her down. Right now, she’s afraid of you.”
“Lemme see if I got this right, boyo. What you want me to do, the entire thing of it, is find Priscilla Sweet’s pot of gold, assuming it exists?”
Pat Hogan raised his glass, held it between us for a moment. He was drinking Chivas (in deference, undoubtedly, to the fact that I was paying the bill), chugging doubles, one after the other. Beyond highlighting his already florid complexion, the booze seemed to have no effect on him, though it was definitely giving me the shakes. I kept hearing a little voice whisper, So what’s your excuse for staying sober now, asshole?
“There’s more to the story, of course.” I squeezed a wedge of lemon into my Perrier. “But I don’t want to tell you what it is. I don’t want to give you that much power over my client.”
“You don’t trust me?” He sliced off a chunk of rare steak, worked it into a puddle of fat and blood at the bottom of his plate.
“There’s no need to know here, Pat. Nothing in it for either one of us.”
“There’s still Caleb.”
I put down my glass, let my shoulders settle against the back of the booth. Hogan seemed even more dissolute than when I’d last seen him. He was wearing a well-stained tweed jacket over a well-stained yellow shirt. His brown tie looked stiff enough to shatter.
“I trust you enough,” I finally said, “to ask you to do whatever it takes. And to back up the request with cash. That gives you power over me.” I paused long enough to get a nod of recognition. “Look, if that money exists, all I want is to know it. You, on the other hand, should feel free to put the cash in your pocket.”
Hogan’s mouth, virtually lipless, expanded into a shadowy grin. His close-set eyes drew together as if he’d suddenly gone cross-eyed. “And that’s all ya want? To know?”
“Asked and answered.” I sipped at my Perrier, set the glass on the table. “As for Caleb, in my opinion the newspapers have the facts pretty close to right. Which means those directly responsible are beyond punishment.”
To his credit, Hogan didn’t press me further. He took the envelope I passed across the table, jammed it into a pocket without looking inside. “To the wars,” he said as he rose, ignoring the check. “You’ll be hearing from me within a few days.”
When I returned to the office, I found, along with the usual jumble of media come-ons, a message from Rebecca Barthelme on the answering machine requesting that I call her at home. I can honestly say that I didn’t expect to hear Julie’s voice on the tape, but that doesn’t mean I wasn’t listening for it. Or that I didn’t take out my disappointment on my cocounsel.
