Silent Mercy (8 page)
“Got it.” The campaign poster that hung in my office had Battaglia’s head shot over one of his favorite slogans: You Can’t Play Politics with People’s Lives.
“More likely you’ll come to your senses and settle down with your Frenchman and have a brood of little litigators who can also cook a mean omelet.”
“Now, that doesn’t sound very enlightened of you, Paul,” I said, wagging a finger at him.
“Be realistic. I got Sonia Sotomayor a seat on the Supreme Court, didn’t I? That kind of lightning won’t strike twice for my best staffers.”
He was in his late sixties and had been reelected five times, with no signs of slowing down.
“When you tell me you’re ready to step aside, I’ll have it figured out.”
I had my own unique piece of the criminal law in our Special Victims Unit, and loved everything about my ability to do advocacy for victims who’d been denied voices for so long. The political aspect of the DA’s job—trying to be all things to all voters—left me cold.
“Whatever you need, pull it together for this one. Don’t hesitate to ask for anything,” he said, reaching across his desk for the daily court calendar, the multipage roster that reported every trial case and disposition in the Supreme Court parts, where all the felony cases were argued. “How’s that Koslawski matter going? You’re doing a good job keeping it under the radar screen.”
“Flip to page five—you’ll see it there. We’re in front of Lyle Keets. I left an update memo with Rose before I went home last night. I just assumed you’d seen it.”
“Must be in this pile,” he said, twizzling the cigar butt between his lips as he looked for the memo.
“Barry Donner caught the case when it came in. He’s a good junior assistant, so I didn’t want to take it away from him. But once the defense waived a jury in front of Keets and we figured out there might be a surprise witness, I decided to second-seat Barry in the event he needed a hand.”
A second seat in the courtroom—literally an extra chair at counsel table—was usually occupied by the less-experienced lawyers who were assigned grunt work for the bigger guns. In our office, they wheeled the evidence cart of exhibits to and from the trial, put on witnesses of lesser importance, and made routine notifications to get cops and civilians to court at the proper day and hour, often haggling with police bosses about bringing essential players in on overtime.
This time we turned the tables on the tabloids. The defendant—a private-school teacher charged with molesting a fourteen-year-old student—had no name recognition to attract media attention, and by listing Barry Donner as the lead prosecutor, the crew in the press room failed to attach any high-profile connection to the case.
“I made a lot of promises there’d be no grandstanding on this one, Alex.”
“Promises to? ...”
Battaglia ignored my question. “No grandstanding. I made that clear to you.”
I could see the memo I’d dashed off the previous evening about what was going to happen today at the Koslawski trial on top of the in-box file. Of course the district attorney had read it first thing this morning. It was the real reason I’d been summoned, to be given an extra admonition. Of course Battaglia was talking directly to Cardinal McCarron about the trial.
“It’s not my fault that Koslawski’s lawyer decided to call Bishop Deegan as a character witness, Paul. The bishop testified on direct yesterday afternoon, and it was as plain vanilla and coddling of the defendant as you would think. It was nonsense.” Dishonest is what I wanted to call it, but that would be pushing the district attorney too far. “Enright’s just trying to appeal to the court’s old-fashioned sense of religious propriety, but I think her plan is about to backfire.”
Denys Koslawski, now a private-school teacher, was a defrocked priest.
Barry Donner had done a tremendous job securing records from the archdiocese in which Koslawski had served as a much younger man. Now we needed to get the evidence of his prior uncharged crimes—swept under the church carpet at the time—into the record.
“Watch whose feet you step on.”
“I’m not looking to embarrass anyone here.” It wasn’t the moment to remind Battaglia of his other favorite campaign slogan—that justice would be done in his office without fear and without favor. “You can’t give this perp another pass.”
“I’m not suggesting anything like that, Alex. But there’s no need for you to play Torquemada in this either. Young Mr. Donner can probably do fine on his own.”
“I’ll pass along your vote of confidence to him, Boss, and remind you of it when it comes time to evaluate the staff for raises. Is that it?” I asked. “’Cause I’d better get up to the courtroom.”
“Chapman didn’t see any connection, did he?”
“Connection to what?” I stopped. “Rose has Mike’s number, Paul. Feel free to call and ask him whatever it is you want to know.”
“Any link between a murder victim deposited on the church steps and the fact that you’re on trial at this very moment, going after a priest. The timing of that is tricky, don’t you think?”
“A fallen priest, thrown out of his position because he couldn’t keep his hands off teenage boys, and a decapitated woman—probably Jewish—”
“Like you. Could be a message in that.”
“A decapitated woman who was tortured and dismembered? Left on the steps of a Baptist church? None of us saw a connection to Denys Koslawski, Boss. Maybe if she’d been dumped on the doorstep at St. Patrick’s Cathedral, I’d think differently.”
“Don’t be facetious, Alexandra.”
“Well, please don’t look for trouble where there isn’t any.”
“I’d hate to think you brought on a tragedy of this magnitude when a slap on the hand would have sufficed as punishment for Koslawski.”
“You think something that I did brought on this murder? You can’t be serious, Paul.” Maybe if Koslawki’s hand had been slapped enough times to leave some bruises, I stopped short of saying, it would have kept him from reaching for the zippers of the vulnerable young men who looked to the church for spiritual guidance.
“I think Cardinal McCarron was simply worried on your behalf. I expressed that poorly.”
“Thank the cardinal for his concern, Paul. Hope you can both keep the faith.”
SEVEN
“THE
boss said that to you?” Donner asked. He’d overheard my short conversation with Mercer before the elevator doors closed to take us up to Part 67 of the Supreme Court, Criminal Term, of the state of New York, on the fifteenth floor of the monolithic and dreadfully outdated WPA-designed courthouse.
boss said that to you?” Donner asked. He’d overheard my short conversation with Mercer before the elevator doors closed to take us up to Part 67 of the Supreme Court, Criminal Term, of the state of New York, on the fifteenth floor of the monolithic and dreadfully outdated WPA-designed courthouse.
“Why? Can you see steam coming out of my nose and ears? Blood oath, Barry—you never heard what I said about Battaglia or the cardinal. I just needed to vent to a friend so I can calm down and focus on what we’ve got to do today.”
“I didn’t think I’d be making enemies in this job.”
“Nothing to get paranoid about. You won’t. This is a tough issue for Battaglia. He’s one of the city’s most visible Catholics in public office, and the church has been notoriously ineffective in acknowledging the problem of sexual abuse in its ranks.”
“Have you prosecuted other priests?” Donner asked as the doors opened and we made our way past paroled perps and bedraggled relatives waiting for short visits with imprisoned sons and husbands and brothers whose cases were also on the court calendars.
“I was a rookie when I handled my first complaint, a dozen years ago. A Dominican woman from Inwood had an eleven-year-old kid. The local parish priest took an interest in him when he started struggling in school.”
“That must happen all the time.”
“It does. So Mrs. Caceres was fine with it. In fact, she thought it was the best of all possible worlds. Father Leopold offered to tutor the boy in his apartment the evenings that Mrs. Caceres was working late. She was saying more novenas for Leopold’s well-being than anyone on the planet. What better? In a neighborhood where gangs roughed up or recruited all the kids, this boy had a guardian angel keeping him off the streets.”
“Till the kid complained?” Barry asked.
“He couldn’t bring himself to tell his mother, which is common with most adolescents. He just became very withdrawn and wanted to stop going to see Father Leopold. His mother insisted otherwise, telling him he’d better cooperate and do everything the priest wanted him to do. Everything. Listen to him, she kept insisting, and obey him. No disrespect.”
“And he did, right?”
“Yes, he did. For several weeks, until he had a breakdown in school, after Leopold had moved from touching the boy to sodomizing him. It was a doctor at Columbia-Presbyterian who notified child welfare and the police. That’s how I got the case.”
“Did you have Leopold arrested?”
The court officer unlocked the door and let us into the empty courtroom. We walked down the aisle and I pushed the gate that admitted us to the well, taking our assigned table closest to the jury box.
“It was my rude awakening to how the church operated. At the first whiff of a complaint, the priests were moved to another archdiocese. Another state, thousands of miles away. Beyond the subpoena power of the state of New York. Leopold had come from some town in Wisconsin, where he’d run the youth group. Before the ink on the Caceres complaint was dry, he was relocated to a really poor parish south of Austin, Texas. The church leaders just shuffled their problems around, hoping no one would notice.”
“But you’re usually a pit bull about this stuff, Alex. Didn’t you go after Leopold? Didn’t you bring the boy in?”
“Once. I had one shot at an interview with a painfully shy adolescent who would rather have had a root canal than talk to me about Leopold’s sexual advances. I had a whole plan for gaining his trust over time and building the case. But the church lawyers moved faster than I did. They offered Mrs. Caceres a settlement she couldn’t refuse.”
“Money? She took money to kill the case?”
“You bet she did. She didn’t want to start a scandal, publicly accusing a priest of molesting her son. Wouldn’t be good for the boy, and it certainly wouldn’t be good for her beloved church.”
“And Leopold, what became of him?”
“Typical of the pattern, Barry. A couple of years in a small parish in a remote part of Texas hill country, then on to Oregon, then up to Bridgeport. And always gravitating toward his target population. Supervising the altar boys, organizing retreats for the youth choir. You’ve seen stories about civil cases against priests, but you’ll search pretty hard to find any criminal cases that have been successfully prosecuted. Not one in this county when I got to this job.”
“Is that why you’ve been so adamant about no plea for Koslawski?”
“That’s part of it,” I said. “He’s had lots of chances, over and over again. He’s hurt so many young lives and walked away from them each time, protected by the Mother Church.”
“And if Sheila Enright hadn’t been so hell-bent on putting Koslawski’s character in evidence through Bishop Deegan, the religious background wouldn’t have tiptoed its way into this case.”
We were spreading our files on the table when Enright and her client walked into the courtroom. She was an associate in a white-shoe law firm in which her senior partners billed their clients at $850 an hour. That representation was the first sign that Koslawski had someone with a deeper pocket trying to protect him. When I checked the list of archdiocesan settlements, the McGuinn, Hannon, and Cork name came up repeatedly.
“Good morning, Sheila,” I said.
She mumbled a greeting to me and to Barry, but her client was stone-faced. “Any sign of Keets yet?”
“His secretary called to tell us to come up. She said he’s ready to go.”
Enright put her briefcase beside her chair and began whispering to her client. It was a smart move for a sex offender to have a woman at his side for trial. It often made a defendant seem more benign and unlikely to be threatening to anyone. It might have backfired in this circumstance because of Enright’s manner. Her attack on the victim had been strident and nasty in tone and substance. There was nothing to corroborate his version of the events—there rarely was, since sex crimes were not likely to be committed in front of witnesses—but the youth’s calm demeanor and forthright responses to her questions reflected the confidence of his candor.
One of the court officers banged twice on the side door that led to the judge’s robing room. “All rise. The Honorable Lyle Keets entering the courtroom.”
The black robe draped over his shoulders and the leather-bound notebook he carried suited the judge’s patrician bearing. Keets mounted the three steps to the bench, followed by his law assistant, and ordered us to be seated as he pulled in his chair. The stenographer took her place in the well, between the witness stand and the judge’s chair above her.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” he said, lifting a fountain pen while checking the previous day’s notes. “We suspended after the direct examination by Ms. Enright of her witness, Bishop Edward Deegan. Are we ready to resume testimony?”
“Yes, sir,” Barry Donner answered.
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