Bad Lawyer (19 page)

“Sid?” She reached across the table, laid her fingertips on the back of my hand. The gesture was shockingly intimate. “Look, it’s okay if you can’t do it. The trial can be delayed. I can find somebody else.”

I responded by putting her to work. Priscilla’s success or failure at trial would depend on personal testimony that persuaded as much with posture and tone of voice as with the literal meaning of the words she spoke. Detached amusement was not going to cut it.

“It’s my job,” I told her just before we began, “to put a little sparkle in those flat, gray eyes. That way you won’t spend the rest of your life in scenic Bedford Hills.”

On the way back to the office, I met briefly with Benny Levine at the Slipper. Benny was pretty sure his people would be able to arrange a meeting with Guzman by the end of the week. Meetings were no problem at all.

“But it’s not like the old days,” he was quick to add. “We had real men back in those days, men of honor. Now we’re like the fuckin’ liberals. Nobody’s scared of us.”

It wasn’t, he went on to explain, that today’s mob didn’t have balls. No, they were as quick to protect their honor as their forebears. But they wouldn’t kill a man’s entire family to make a point. They wouldn’t slash open a kid while the parents watched.

“We’re not fuckin’ animals.” Benny paused long enough to shake his head mournfully. “Them spies, Sid, they got no respect for anything.”

Still, even that judgment didn’t mean—motivated as they were by profit—that the new breed was beyond reason. In the case of Elizado Guzman, for instance, it was simply a matter of convincing him that slaughtering Priscilla Sweet’s impoverished attorney would gain him nothing, while at the same time offering a little hope. A little hope in the form of a large loan at the usual rates.

“What I’m thinkin’ here, Sid,” Benny concluded, “is that we could maybe work ourselves up to a piece of Guzman’s action. Not with threats, like in the old days, but by offerin’ our management skills along with enough capital to keep the operation afloat.”

It was cold when I left the bar, and near dark; I remember pausing a half block from the Slipper to button my coat, tuck in my scarf. What was clear to me was that everybody was working an angle, from Guzman to Priscilla to myself, while Benny Levine was working two or three at the same time.

Julie was on the phone when I came through the door. She mouthed a single word,
Guzman
, without taking the phone away from her ear. I nodded once, heard her say, “Mr. Kaplan just came in, Mr. Guzman. He’ll take your call in a moment.” Then she put him on hold and smiled up at me.

“Our boy a little anxious?” I hung my overcoat on a hanger, dumped my hat on the rack.

“Not so you could tell. He’s been propositioning me for the last fifteen minutes.”

I walked into my office, set the answering machine to record the conversation, picked up the phone. “Elizado,” I said, “how’s it going?”

“I don’ know till you tell me.” He didn’t flinch at the sound of his real name, leaving me to wonder if he’d noticed my using it. “How am I doin’?”

“Well, not as good as you might be,” I admitted. “See it’s kind of hard for Priscilla to admit that she has your money when she got me for nothing by telling me she was broke.” I paused, hoping he’d make an incriminating statement, but he was smart enough to keep his mouth shut. “I don’t know if you know this, Elizado, but Priscilla’s mother owns a house in Queens. Priscilla thinks her mother can be persuaded to take out a small mortgage. Not enough to pay you what you claim Byron owed you, but maybe enough to get you out of a jam.”

“Tha’s no good. I don’t got no time for no mortgage.”

“Don’t be so pessimistic. A home equity loan can be approved in a couple of days. Priscilla said that she’d call her mother tonight, start the ball rolling.” The door to my office cracked open, revealing Julie’s anxious face. I winked by way of demonstrating that Elizado hadn’t dispatched me via telephone, then returned to the conversation while she watched. “Figure, if everything goes right, Priscilla will have something for you by the end of the week.”

“Tha’s too slow.” His smooth voice cracked on the last word, hinting at an inner desperation that scared the piss out of me.

“C’mon, man. What did you think? That she had the fucking money in her cell? That she was gonna pass it over to me on Rikers Island? Look, Elizado, my client is telling me that she doesn’t have your money and I believe her. Despite that, she’s willing to pay if that means you’ll get off her back. But if you can’t hang on until the end of the week, we’re both wasting our time here. I don’t do miracles.”

I held the phone away from my mouth, said, “Julie, bring me in the files on Benny Levine and Manny Bergman, lemme update them while I have a chance.”

“Who you talking to?” Guzman asked.

“I’m talking to my paralegal, Elizado. An incredibly talented woman, just in case you need representation sometime in the future.”

“What I’m needin’ is my fuckin’ money.”

“Elizado, lemme ask you this: Do you really think Priscilla, if she did steal your money, gave that money to me?” Even as I asked the question, I knew the rational answer was, no, of course not, nobody in their right mind would rip off the keeper of the crocodile pit in order to pay a lawyer.

Another long pause, thankfully the last of the series. “Friday, I’m gonna call you up at nine o’clock right where you sittin’ now. Wha’ you gonna say to me is yes or fuckin’ no. Tha’s it. You got it or you don’t. No more Jew lawyer bullshit.”

It was snowing the next morning as Caleb, Julie, and I made our way to the office, a sharp, painful snow pushed to near-horizontal by an unrelenting wind. Almost instinctively, we followed each other in single file, heads bent, shuffling our feet along the sidewalks like timid figure skaters. My cheeks were half frozen by the time we got to Union Square, despite the wool scarf wrapped around my face, excuse enough I felt to justify a quiet day in the office. We’d catch up on our collective paperwork, indulge in caffeine-driven strategy sessions, feast on meals delivered by undocumented aliens, maybe even drag out the polishing rags and a vacuum cleaner.

A lazy day filled with necessary tasks. It was the kind of vacation that can only be fully appreciated by another junkie. After a year of intensive rehabilitation, Caleb, Julie, and I had simply switched addictions. Instead of alcohol, coke, or dope, we were addicted to work and to each other—addictions that not only didn’t harm us, but which, arguably, had lifted us out of degradation and poverty.

The snow, which had been tapering off all morning, stopped just before eleven. Still, we managed to stick to the game plan until after we’d put away two small pizzas and a cold antipasto between noon and one. The phone rang then, while I was tearing the pizza boxes into pieces small enough to be stuffed into the wastebasket, bringing with it an offer guaranteed to drag me out of the office.

The caller, Susan Veraci, identified herself as the producer of the CNN panel show, “Real Opinion Live,” which was doing a segment on spousal abuse at three o’clock and had lost one of its panelists, an attorney from Connecticut who claimed to be snow bound. Ms. Veraci understood that she was calling at the last minute, but if I had the time and wanted to substitute, they’d interview me, along with a copanelist, remote from a studio in Rockefeller Center. The show, of course, would be aired nationally.

To my credit, I showed no untoward eagerness besides asking her which cheek of her ass she wanted me to kiss first. And I wasted no time getting out of the office, shrugging into my coat while I explained the mission to my comrades.

“What I’m gonna do, I think, is go with the question of who deserves protection. Do you have to be white, middle-class, and heterosexual before society grants you the right to self-defense? Maybe we should limit self-defense to virgin princesses, let the carnal commoners take the beating and like it.” I jammed my hat on my head. “I should be out of the studio by four. You guys gonna watch the show?”

“Well, I don’t know, Sid,” Julie returned without missing a beat. “There’s a “Honeymooners” rerun on Comedy Central that I’ve only seen a couple of hundred times.”

I was much too egotistical to ask the obvious question: Why had CNN chosen Sidney Kaplan from among the ten or twenty thousand feminists in New York City? But the answer became obvious when I met my copanelist at the studio. Phoebe Morris was grinning broadly as she extended a hand. “Mr. Kaplan,” she said, “we meet at last.”

The show went well, considering the logistics. The host, a woman named Eleanor Kelly, shuffled back and forth between the two panelists by her side in an Atlanta studio, and Phoebe and me in Manhattan. The first part of the discussion centered on a trial in Miami about which I knew nothing, but then a merciful caller brought up the O.J. Simpson case, allowing me to make a well-prepared point.

“Let’s suppose,” I told an audience of millions, “that Nicole Brown decided to take matters into her own hands, say when that fourteen minute 911 tape was made. Suppose she killed O.J. Simpson and the Los Angeles District Attorney decided to put her on trial.” I remember, at that point, turning slightly to look into the camera. “What the prosecution would have done is put Nicole Brown’s whole life on trial. The Hollywood parties, the sleeping around, the dabbling in drugs and homosexuality, sex on the couch while the kids were sleeping upstairs. That last would have been enough, all by itself, for a conviction.”

Phoebe, who’d been introduced as a Pulitzer Prize winner for a series on battered women (a series evidently written during my blotto years, because I had no memory of it), nodded thoughtfully before jumping into the debate.

“My research demonstrated that the lower a woman’s socioeconomic status, the more likely a jury to reject a claim of self-defense. Prostitutes who killed their pimps were in the worst position of all. These were women, Eleanor, who’d been reduced to virtual slavery; one and all they’d been scarred by their masters. But in each case, the prosecutor jumped on their backgrounds. They were whores and petty thieves who took drugs and neglected their children and were therefore guilty of murder. It may seem ridiculous, but, trust me, Eleanor, I went through the transcripts carefully and that’s exactly what happened.”

After the show wrapped up, Phoebe invited me and my crew to join her for an early dinner. I tried to call Julie and Caleb at the office, got the machine, hung up without leaving a message.

“The work ethic personified,” I explained to Phoebe as we tried to flag down a cab on 6th Avenue. The snow had stopped, but the wind, if anything, had picked up. It was bitterly cold, and my feet half froze in the few minutes it took us to abandon surface transportation in favor of the subway.

We rode uptown, to an Indian restaurant on Amsterdam Avenue, and talked about Priscilla Sweet while we feasted on
samosas
, mulligatawny soup, fiery lamb
vindaloo,
and mango ice cream. Toward the end of the meal, I called Elizabeth Howe, our spousal abuse expert, and arranged an interview for Phoebe, then trudged off in search of a taxi.

A full moon hung over Lexington Avenue as I made my way downtown, bright enough against the inky sky to be my personal spotlight. I watched it through the windshield, looking over the driver’s shoulder. The radio, tuned to a Latin station, was playing softly through the rear speakers. And I remember thinking, as the cab worked its way around a Con Edison dig at 34th Street, that one day, and sooner rather than later, Elizado Guzman would become the subject of one of those fascinating anecdotes I used to relate at important cocktail parties. The kind of parties to which, five years before, I’d been routinely invited.

I
WAS HOME FROM
school on the day my
bubbe
died. It was February 12, 1956, Abraham Lincoln’s actual birthday and not merely the closest convenient Monday. My father was at work, as he would be on George Washington’s birthday later in the month. That left Magda or myself to answer the phone when Grampa Itzy called.

It was raining outside, a cold steady downpour, the kind of weather I favored at fourteen. Now I had a good excuse to stay in my room all day, putter with a science project due in a couple of weeks, maybe finish Harold Gray’s novel,
The Hoods
, which I’d begun reading the night before.

My only friend at the time, Vinnie Barrone (who went to Bishop Loughlin and didn’t have the day off) had given me
The Hoods,
just as he’d given me
A Stone For Danny Fisher
and
Knock On Any Door.
Defiant heroes who lived short, violent lives fit my self-image perfectly.

But I wasn’t in my room when Grampa Itzy called. I was in the kitchen, fussing with an onion omelet. Magda was sitting at the other end of the table, sipping at a cup of coffee while she composed one of her letters. She wrote, as she always did, with a fountain pen on pale blue stationary, her handwriting small and precise.

The phone startled the both of us and I remember Magda looking across the table, almost imploring me to answer it, to leave her wrapped in the cocoon of her obsession. A few years earlier, I would have picked up without thinking twice, but at fourteen, with the sexual fires raging, I’d begun to cultivate a sullen quality. Perhaps by way of complementing the acne blossoming on my cheeks.

In the six times the phone rang before Magda finally got up, I crisscrossed my omelet with an unbroken line of ketchup, added salt and pepper which it didn’t need, and buttered a slice of toasted rye bread. I wore my hair in a well-greased pompadour back then, with the forelock pulled down to cover my brow. The hair was my barrier whenever I needed to disappear while in the company of my parents or my teachers or my schoolmates. I used it then, at lunch, while the phone in the small foyer continued to ring, letting it hang like a spider’s web between myself and my mother’s entreaty.

“Hello?”

After a long silence, I finally raised my head to find Magda with her right hand pressed against her chest, her fingers raised to the hollow of her throat. Her breath popped from her lungs in a series of sharp, hollow coughs.