Fresh Kills (35 page)

I had to get a hit next time, or admit I wasn't ready for the bigs.

I pushed open the giant carved wooden door to the courtroom with the name Justice de Freitas on the identifying plaque, and stepped onto the big roller coaster.

I'd thrown up my popcorn and cotton candy after my first ride on the real Mean Streak; walking into my first-ever federal courtroom, representing the most famous defendant I'd ever had, I felt the same queasiness in my stomach. Of course, I reassured myself, this time I hadn't had five beers and two joints before getting on the roller coaster.

I reminded myself I'd gone back later for a second ride. By the time we'd left Cedar Point, the Mean Streak was my new favorite. I hoped I'd feel the same way about high-profile federal cases sometime before the verdict came in.

Davia Singer sat at the prosecution table with her file spread out before her in neat, orderly stacks of paper. I gazed at her as I made my way up the aisle toward the defense table. What kind of lawyer was she? I wondered. How would we play against one another at trial?

Davia. A soft, evocative name. A name that promised loose curls framing an olive-skinned face with huge dark eyes. A name that promised a soft, slightly accented voice. A name that held mystery, femininity, yet conveyed the strength of a David.

Which left me playing the uncoveted role of Goliath.

Lazarus stood aside and smiled as Riordan and I walked through the heavy door. It was the smile of a predator who sees his prey coming within claw range. I smiled back, beaming confidently. If there was one thing I'd learned from the man who was now my client, it was to radiate confidence no matter what. In fact, the more scared you were, the more important it was to make people think you had the world by the tail.

I stepped up to the defense table and set my briefcase on its shiny surface. I opened it and pulled out a yellow legal pad and a nearly-empty manila folder. I set them carefully on the table, marking my territory as instinctively as a cat.

I had to make the courtroom as much mine as Davia Singer's. I opened my card case, took out a card with my name and address on it, and walked up to the court reporter. I handed it to him with a smile and told him I'd want the arraignment minutes as soon as possible. “I'm willing to pay rush rates,” I added.

This was Riordan's idea. It was the legal equivalent of handing the maitre d' a big tip to insure good service.

The courtroom was filling up. The reporters were print people, for the most part; without cameras in the courtroom, the television types were limited in their coverage. I recognized
Village Voice
columnist Jesse Winthrop, the grand old man of New York City muckraking, in the first row. He still resembled an urban Jewish John Brown, with deep-set eyes that burned with indignation.

The rest of the rows were occupied by well-dressed young lawyers. Probably Singer's cheering section; baby U.S. Attorneys eager to see the aging gunslinger Matt Riordan brought down by one of their own. She was a new import from Brooklyn, I'd recently learned. She'd transferred from the quieter precincts of the Eastern District to the goldfish bowl of the Southern.

The huge door swung open and a grossly fat man waddled up the aisle, trailed by a ferret of a man with a bald pate and a furtive glance. Fat Jack Vance, Riordan's bail bondsman, had arrived, along with his lawyer, a Baxter Street hack named Sid Margolies.

“All rise. The United States District Court in and for the Southern District of New York is now in session. All those who have business before this court draw near and give your attention.”

I rose, my heart thudding with anticipation. Judge de Freitas stepped forward and took the bench. He was a small, neat man with liver spots on his bald crown. With his sad eyes and sagging jowls, he bore an uncanny resemblance to the late Adlai Stevenson. He had taught Evidence before his elevation to the bench; one of his prize students at Fordham Law School had been a young Matt Riordan.

The bailiff called the case. I felt a jolt of doubt and fear as the words were spoken out loud: “United States of America versus Matthew Daniel Riordan and John Anthony Vance.”

I was used to having the state of New York lined up against my client, but this time it was the whole country.

We began the ritual.

“Mr. Riordan, you are charged with violating Title 18, Section 201 of the United States Code. How do you plead?”

“Not guilty, Your Honor,” Matt said in ringing tones. As the lawyer, I usually answered on my client's behalf, but with the reporters avidly taking in every nuance, we'd decided Riordan should proclaim his innocence early and often.

“Ms. Singer,” the judge went on in a thin, dry voice I knew was going to get on my nerves at trial, “do you have Rule 16 material to turn over to defense counsel?”

Singer nodded and handed me one of the massive piles of material on her table; I acknowledged receipt for the record and tried not to look as daunted as I felt. There was an envelope on top, bulging with hard, rectangular objects: tape cassettes.

They had him on tape. Lani had warned me, but it still felt as if the roller-coaster was taking a hundred-yard plunge, leaving my stomach on the platform.

The bailiff turned his attention to our co-defendant. I breathed a sigh of relief.

“Mr. Vance, how do you plead to these charges?”

The roller-coaster swerved, nearly knocking me out of the seat. Instead of the “not guilty” I'd been expecting, Sid Margolies replied, “Your Honor, Mr. Vance pleads guilty to the crime of aiding and abetting a bribery.”

I shot a quick glance at Davia Singer. She was wearing a catlike smile, a smile that said she knew she'd scored the first points in this game. She'd done something I hadn't anticipated, for starters, and she'd taken away one of my most important weapons in Matt's defense.

I needed Fat Jack at trial. I could have made a motion under Rule 14 to sever Matt's case and try him separately from the bail bondsman. I hadn't made the motion because I needed the fat man sitting next to Riordan, looking gross and slimy, in sharp contrast to my client's dapper appearance. I needed him as the jury's focus, as the man who'd really done the bribing, using Matt's name but without authority to do so. A guilty plea took him out of the case and left Matt facing the music alone.

It got worse. My stomach churned as I listened to Fat Jack enter his plea. Aiding and abetting—and in order to plead to aiding and abetting, he had to recite chapter and verse regarding exactly whom he'd aided and abetted. And that meant Matt.

According to Fat Jack, Riordan had given him money to give to Eddie Fitz in return for the minutes of the grand jury testimony of one Annunziato Aiello. He'd been the go-between, and he made it very clear that he'd received money from Matt and delivered the grand jury minutes directly into Matt's hands.

Which explained the plea. The prosecution was letting Fat Jack cop a plea in exchange for his testimony against Matt. Singer would call Vance to the stand, and I'd have a shot at showing the jury he'd cut a deal to save his oversized ass at my client's expense. It was a standard prosecution ploy, and one I was increasingly certain I could deal with at trial.

I could handle this, I told myself, as my stomach settled down. The Mean Streak wasn't so different from the old wooden roller coaster I was used to.

When Fat Jack was finished, Davia Singer assured the court on the record that no consideration had been offered for this plea. It was legalese for “there was no deal.”

I gave what I hoped was a ladylike snort of derision; of course Fat Jack had cut a deal; he was going to catch a break on sentence, the U.S. attorney was going to put him on the stand and turn him against Matt, and I was going to have a field day explaining to the jury just how far they could trust a man who'd copped a plea in return for his testimony.

What was Singer thinking? Fat Jack Vance as the linchpin of the government's case? The same Fat Jack who had apparently just pled guilty to fraud? Matt had assured me that Vance's troubles in Brooklyn were wholly unconnected to our case; they involved a construction company and a multimillion-dollar negligence claim. If Singer intended to put Fat Jack on the stand against Riordan, I'd have a cross-examination made in heaven.

I tuned back in; they were talking sentence. “The government will make no recommendation as to sentence, Your Honor,” Singer was saying, “except that it is to run concurrent with whatever sentence is imposed in the Eastern District of New York on the unrelated charge of criminal conspiracy to defraud.”

It was a cute trick. By avoiding any recommendation on the record, by deferring to the Eastern District on sentence, Singer was laying the groundwork for denying a deal in front of Riordan's jury. She would be able to tell them she hadn't offered Fat Jack a cut in sentence in return for his testimony against Matt because the sentence that counted was being imposed in an unrelated case across the river and had nothing to do with her or her office.

It was a cute trick, but it wasn't going to work. No jury could listen to this and believe there was no deal. Fat Jack on the stand was something I was very much looking forward to.

I made a mental note to follow up on something Matt had told me: that Davia Singer had begun her prosecutorial career in the Eastern District, under Dominick Di Blasi. Did that mean she and her old boss were up to something regarding Vance? I intended to find out.

And then the roller coaster took another sharp swerve. “Mr. Vance will not be called at trial by the prosecution,” Singer announced. She gave another one of her enigmatic smiles; she was enjoying this. It was as if she'd anticipated every turn my mind would take—and then shot down all my assumptions, stymied all my strategies. Of course, that was her job as a lawyer and a prosecutor. I just wished she wasn't so damned good at it.

I stood as straight and still as a redwood tree. And just about as intelligent; I was having a hard time adjusting to the concept of a trial without Fat Jack as a co-defendant and/or witness for the prosecution. My entire defense strategy depended on Fat Jack, and now the prosecution was letting him walk. And trying to convince the judge there had been no deal.

But why let Jack take a walk unless they could squeeze him to testify against the man he'd worked for?

There had to be a deal. But how were we going to prove it?

I stepped out of the courtroom feeling almost as queasy as I had the first time I'd ridden the real Mean Streak.

Riordan maintained his coiled-spring cool until we jumped into a cab on Centre Street, and then he exploded.

“That fucking bastard,” he burst out, the consonants hitting the air with hard little sounds like a bullet fired through a silencer. “That unscrupulous scumbag, that—”

“I take it you're referring to Nick Lazarus,” I said mildly.

“He lets Jack cop a plea, then tries to sell the judge that there's no deal. Of course there's a deal, for God's sake. What does he think we are, stupid?”

“We've got three weeks to prove there's a deal,” I pointed out. “Three weeks to prepare our defense. Of course,” I went on, thinking aloud, “we could always ask for an adjournment if we can't—”

“No adjournments,” my client announced. “Adjournments are for losers.”

I shelved the discussion; it would only be important if we actually needed to put the case over. But Matt wouldn't let it go. He turned to me in the back seat of the cab and locked onto my eyes. “Lazarus will jump like a cougar on any sign of weakness,” he elaborated, “and I'm not going to give him anything he can jump on. He smells blood in the water, he'll be like a shark, taking bites out of us. So no adjournments no matter what. I don't care if the judge calls us tomorrow and wants to pick a jury at ten o'clock, we're ready. Got that?”

I nodded. The cab had snaked its way through traffic and was facing horn-honking gridlock at Canal Street. Crossing Canal during rush hour was like fording the Mississippi; it would take a good five minutes just to get through the intersection, and the Israeli cab driver would be leaning on the horn all the way. Conversation, however important, was no longer possible.

I leaned back in my seat and enjoyed the reprieve. It would last, I knew, only until we reached Riordan's midtown office. Then we'd resume my postgraduate course in federal criminal practice.

Ten minutes later, we took a right on Forty-second, and went around the block. The cabbie let us off in front of an imposing office building with rococo gold trim. The Helmsley Building, it was called, and its choicest offices had panoramic views of Park Avenue.

Matt paid the cabbie and I hopped out into the overheated air. I waited for him on the sidewalk, which was so hot it burned the soles of my feet through my thin shoes. I nodded at the doorman, who smiled broadly as he held open the gilded door. Riordan always got first-class service, thanks to the hefty tips he handed out at Christmas.

You entered Matt's office in three stages. First, the waiting room, with its Daumier legal prints on the wall, its dark green leather couch, its exotic flower arrangement with pale peach lilies and deep mauve chrysanthemums. Tasteful but not personal, a waiting room that deliberately said as little as possible about Riordan's true personality.

The next room was the one Matt called the parlor. It was decorated in the same deep green and pink-peach tones, but here the effect was welcoming, homey. The green was the background color of a chintz pattern that covered two armchairs, placed at angles for easy conversation. A small drop-leaf table was set between the chairs, and a reading lamp stood behind one of them. It was a cozy nook where two people could engage in the most intimate kind of discussion. It was where Matt routinely accepted the most sacred confidences from his clients.

The inner sanctum was Matt's own personal office. The desk was clear and the green leather office chair was shiny and new-looking, but it was a working environment. Piles of transcripts sat on side tables, open law books rested on chairs, and the art on the walls reflected Matt's personal taste.