Bad Lawyer (2 page)

“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.

Fourteen months later, Julia Gill (encouraged by Caleb Talbot, who’d worked on her case) returned in search of a job. Again,
noblesse oblige
ruled the day and I took her (and her recently acquired secretarial skills) into my corporate bosom.

I date the beginning of my personal demise from the day of my mother’s death.

Magda Leibovits, eighteen years old, came to America in 1938 from Budapest, Hungary, shortly after Germany’s invasion of that country. Her escape was neither miraculous nor complicated. Magda’s family, after marshalling its resources, found it had a bankroll sufficient to secure passage out for a single member. Magda was chosen and packed off to distant New York.

When I was very young, I remember her passing her mornings at the kitchen table, writing letters to one organization after another, seeking information on the fate of the family she’d left behind in Hungary. She corresponded with groups, official and unofficial, in the United States, in Israel, in Budapest, Kraków, Prague, Bonn, Paris, Amsterdam, Brussels. A ghost searching for ghosts.

She was always standing by the door when the postman arrived, and I, before I started school, stood with her. I loved the foreign stamps, the spidery handwriting, the odd return addresses. The letters seemed exotic and mysterious, an adventure in the making. They were, in fact, the only life my mother had.

I lost a big case on the day Magda died, one of my biggest. My father was long gone by then, and I’d seen so little of my mother in the intervening years that my secretary (not Julia Gill) decided to hold back the news until after the jury came in with its verdict. I recall being angry, though whether at losing the case or my secretary’s oh-so-accurate reading of my priorities, I can’t say. Perhaps anger was my substitute for grief, as it was my substitute for every other emotion.

For some reason, I went to Magda’s house, the house of my childhood, instead of the funeral home, and let myself in. It wasn’t a very big house, three small bedrooms upstairs, the last tiny enough to qualify as a closet. Downstairs, a living room with a little nook for the dinner table, a half-bath, a kitchen. The unfinished basement, too damp for storage, held the furnace, the washer and dryer, a few rusted tools, their handles gray and moldy.

I went through the house like a burglar, from room to room, touching the odds and ends of Magda’s life—knives and forks, a lace doily on a chair back, the ceramic butterfly I’d given to her on a long-forgotten birthday—holding these objects in my palm as if trying to gauge their weight. My mood was speculative, curious, almost wondering; my progress stately, careful, punctuated only by the occasional snort of first-cut cocaine.

Inevitably, I came to Magda’s bedroom, opened the closets, the drawers in her bureau, feasted on a row of faded housecoats, a pile of neatly mended cotton underwear. Then, beneath a stack of flat white boxes, each containing a pair of nylon stockings, I found a book.

Though kept chronologically, the book was more ledger than diary. In it, my mother had fashioned a record of her correspondence, entering the date and the contents of each letter she’d sent or received. At the very end, after filling more than a hundred pages, she’d listed the names of her immediate and extended families, and their ultimate destinations: Auschwitz, Birkenau, Sobibor, Treblinka, Belzec …

Half the names bore the tag
unknown,
but I think it’s safe to assume that Magda had given up on these, because underneath the list she’d printed two lines in crude block letters:

TOD MACHT FREI

DEATH MAKES FREE

The date of this final entry: October 16, 1963.

I twisted as I fell, like a burning sheet of paper tossed from a high window. Pieces of my life, charred black, flew away as I dropped. My wife, Iris, first, taking my son, David, and what was left of the family fortune to sunny Los Angeles. The hirelings, except for Caleb and Julie, came next. Sharp enough to read the graffiti on the wall (where it was, indeed, writ large), they left for more promising situations. Then I arrived at work one morning to find my office padlocked, my landlord’s attorney standing next to a city marshall, the marshall holding an order to evict.

The Mercedes was gone by then, likewise the Rolex and the pinky ring, the antiques and the co-op overlooking Central Park, and I remember feeling distinctly relieved when I caught sight of the marshall standing in front of the door. He was a short, dumpy man with a ratty mustache, the kind of bureaucrat I routinely bullied in my prime, but I simply turned and walked away, walked directly to the men’s room where I began a monumental binge by filling my nose with cocaine.

By the time I reached Bellevue’s crowded emergency room three days later, my heart was pounding in my chest like a trapped animal. My clothes were drenched with sweat; blood dripped from both nostrils. My eyes were rolling in their sockets, while my arms and legs jerked like the limbs of a puppet in the hands of an epileptic puppeteer. I fully expected to die, felt that I deserved nothing less, was ecstatic and terrified at the same time, a mental state that left the emergency room staff profoundly unimpressed.

They’d seen it all before, of course; they saw it every day. I was given the requisite medication, trundled off to a bed on the third floor, assured that I would live to fight another day.

But I had no fight left. And in the dim, sedated light of the following dawn, I felt my life close around me, as dark and confining as a shroud. The routine of the hospital flowed defiantly: a nurse took my vitals, a doctor repeated the process an hour later, breakfast was laid on the rolling table next to my bed, an orderly tugged me into a chair and fussed with a set of clean sheets. My three neighbors rose, took walks, watched television, received guests, chatted among themselves. I seemed, by comparison, utterly irrelevant, a non-being, devoid of either force or substance.

It was in the middle of this orgy of self-pity that Julia Gill and Caleb Talbot showed up. I remember they were carrying green visitor’s cards and that Julia held hers against her breasts while Caleb let his dangle from his clubby fingers. At another time—and I realized this as they approached my bed, each flashing a thin, unsure smile—I might have been angry at their presumption, but at that moment I would have welcomed my executioner.

“You hit bottom yet?” Caleb asked without preamble. “You ready, boss?”

I remember nodding quickly, then wishing I could take it back, that there was something still within me able to summon a hint of defiance.

On the following day I went, by cab, from Bellevue Hospital to the Rushmore Institute on East 83rd Street and spent the next year in one of two modes. Either I endured the vicious attacks of eight group members or I joined eight group members in attacking some other unfortunate. The experience was hellish by design. You had to be open, to reveal some new awful truth at every turn, a sore wound on which your brothers and sisters would feast. Nor could you back off when it came time to score the others. Pain was to be given, as well as received; one was expected to do one’s bit, to make the sadomasochistic sacrifice.