Bad Lawyer (22 page)

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.

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 mother-fucker, 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.

“So what’s it gonna be,” I said after learning that Rebecca had spoken to Priscilla, “you in or out?”

“That’s not fair,” she responded. “I’ve acted in good faith.”

“You went behind my back after my partner was killed.”

“Not so. Priscilla called me in my office, asked me to come to Rikers.” Her voice was angry, now. “Look, there’s something you need to know. Priscilla never really dismissed the Council. She asked us to stay in touch, just in case things didn’t work out with you. I remember Priscilla’s words exactly: ‘He used to be a great lawyer, but he used to be a drunk, too. I don’t want to be left out in the cold.’”

I responded before the words sunk in. “You still haven’t answered the basic question. You coming or going?”

After a few choice epithets, Rebecca admitted that neither she nor her organization was going anywhere. To do so would prejudice our client. “Besides,” she concluded, “everything’s falling into place. Byron Sweet was a brutal son-of-a-bitch and we’re going to prove it.”

I didn’t argue the point, told her, instead, that I expected to ask for the earliest possible trial date and that our work schedule was going to change. From now on, we’d spend our mornings preparing friendly witnesses for cross-examination. “Time to get the folks ready for Carlo Buscetta. Let’s bring them into the office, put them through a little basic training.”

We went on for a few minutes, but I didn’t pay close attention. Instead, as I hung up, I added a line to the list of numbered statements I’d taped to the surface of my desk:
8. Priscilla pays $5,000 to retain bankrupt ex-drunk while keeping well-heeled, pro bono counsel in reserve.