The Defense: A Novel (8 page)

“Well, I have to do something. If we let this evidence go unchallenged, Miriam Sullivan will have your bail canceled, and you’ll be in handcuffs before Goldstein gets his ass out of the witness box. That means you don’t get the luxury of being able to jump on a plane tomorrow if this all goes to shit.”

I could hear Arturas grinding his teeth. His lips curled up in a grimace as he began shifting his weight from foot to foot. He’d been planning this caper for a long time, and he didn’t like intangibles. But that was trial law. Stepping into a courtroom is just like going to Vegas and rolling the dice—anything can happen. Volchek continued to listen. It was his liberty at stake.

“You don’t need me to tell you what the outcome will be if an accused goes into custody and something happens to a state’s witness. There is no way you will get out on bail until a full investigation has been done and you’ve been cleared. How long is that going to take? Two, maybe three years? Anything can happen on the inside. The state might not be able to link the bomb directly to you, but that doesn’t mean they won’t put you in a cell with a four-hundred-pound cannibal. And that’s if you can avoid the cartels’ soldiers. Yeah, your buddies in the courtroom will get to you on the inside real easy. I can take the fall if it means Amy is safe. I can live with that. Better that than the alternative. But if you go to prison—you lose.”

Volchek exchanged glances with Arturas. He smoothed his pants and tried to swallow down a knowing grin. Despite what I’d just said to Volchek, I knew they weren’t going to leave me or Amy alive at the end of this. They didn’t want me telling the FBI about my daughter being kidnapped and my being forced to plant a bomb in the courtroom. But I needed to let Volchek and Arturas think that I had bought their bullshit story.

“I still want to know what you can do that the other lawyers couldn’t,” said Arturas. A fair question, and I gave him a simple answer. “The other firms were trying to counter the evidence. That’s the wrong approach. It’s like football; say you’re a small, broke football team and you come up against a rich team with a great quarterback. You can’t win in a straight contest. Me, I don’t hesitate. If there’s some gifted, lightning-quick man mountain that I can’t compete with, it’s real simple—I take him out of the game. I cripple him. I tackle him so hard and so fast he isn’t going to wake up until the season’s over. It’s an old saying—sometimes you have to play the man instead of the ball. Litigation is the same; if I can’t destroy the evidence, I have to destroy the witness giving the evidence. If the jury don’t think Goldstein’s credible, it really doesn’t matter what he says. I need the Internet to dig on him. Look, it’s not like we’ve got a choice. Either help me, or I’ll hold your coat while the court security officer puts you in handcuffs. It’s that simple.”

Volchek and Arturas nodded in agreement.

“What will you find in an hour?” said Arturas.

“I won’t know it until I see it.” I really didn’t know. But I had an idea where to look. I could see a smile attempting to force its way through Volchek’s lips. He looked intrigued.

“Okay,” said Arturas, taking out his iPhone. “You tell me what to look for.”

“He’s from the University of Wisconsin. Start with his university bio and then a list of his work. Let me see his published articles for 2000, 2004, and 2008.”

“Why?” asked Arturas.

“If you’re cross-examining any academic witness, you have to look at their publications for those years. Those years were the ARAE: the American Research Assessment Exercise. The more articles published by academic staff in the ARAE, the more funding comes to their university and the more money those nerds take home. During those years, everyone writes articles like crazy, and perfectly reasonable academics write crap that they wouldn’t dream of writing ordinarily. Writing for volume does not promote good theories, and pretty soon they’re writing papers on fairies and UFOs. Back then articles meant cash. So if there’s anything out there that will give us something on Goldstein, that’s where we’ll find it.”

I’d cross-examined a few academics and I’d learned all about the ARAE some years ago. It never failed to give me ammunition. It’s just like everything else in life—you follow the money and it always takes you to where you need to go.

While Arturas looked online, I read through Goldstein’s expert report. I’d once represented Archie Mailor on a check fraud indictment, so I had read reports like this before. Archie had been my counterfeit guy when I was running my insurance scams. He had talent. IDs I got from Archie were usually pretty good. During his case, I had to cross-examine a forensic document examiner who testified about Archie’s handwriting and the fraudulent checks. I had a little knowledge of what these guys looked for, but I hadn’t thought about it for a long time. What I remembered was that they tended to look at the capital letters at the beginning of words. From scanning Goldstein’s report, I saw that he had indeed focused on the capital “G” at the start of “Geraldo,” which Volchek had written on the bill in marker pen. Behind Goldstein’s report, I found a statement from a CSI. He had analyzed the one-ruble bill for fingerprints. Apparently, Little Benny’s fingerprints and those of the custody officer at the precinct who handled Benny’s property had either obscured or wiped out all other identifiable prints.

Arturas took seven minutes to find the right page on the university’s website—
List of Publications 2008
—nothing. We checked 2004 and nothing leaped off the page.

We hit 2000 and there it was, staring at me like gold in a panhandle. Goldstein, like most academics, wanted the greenbacks while they were hot. He’d written half a dozen stupid articles to boost his volume, standing, and pay.

And he’d written one particularly bad one. That gave me a great idea.

“I need this article printed out. I need a photocopier, paper, hot coffee, and to be left the hell alone,” I said. With Arturas listening in, I called the judge’s clerk, Jean, on Arturas’s iPhone, and I sweet-talked her into printing the article for me. I told her I owed her a box of doughnuts and told her where to find the article online. I thought that Miriam probably didn’t even know Jean’s name. Most hotshot lawyers ignore court staff that they would call the “little people.” They did so at their peril and at their cost. Most of the time, the little people were, in fact, the best people.

I had peace in the chambers at last. Victor was in the outer reception, trying to turn on the photocopier. Once he got it working, I would just need to photocopy a couple of pages and blow them up so the jury could take a better look. I spread out some papers on the desk and stared into space, letting the plan come to me. My head still hurt from the punch I’d taken to the back of the head in the limo. If I was to even attempt to double-cross the Russians, I had to put them at their ease, get them to trust me—so they would stop looking over my shoulder. My dad told me you can’t con an honest man, but the hard part was getting the dishonest mark to trust you. Good fraud was all about trust.

“Volchek,” I said. He gestured for me to sit next to him on one of the couches. “Your former lawyers were all excellent, talented professionals. You don’t need me to tell you that, right? You know these guys are at the top of their game. They told you the handwriting expert would kill your defense.”

Volchek’s every action seemed halting, considered, planned. It was almost as if he’d taught himself restraint in order to mask his true nature. He lit a cigar and let it burn down while he thought about his answer. Finally, he said, “They told me that, on its own, it’s not enough to convict me.”

“Right, but they didn’t tell you it might be enough to blow your bail and get the prosecution a retrial, even if Benny’s dead.”

He said nothing. I pressed on.

“And your old lawyers had months to work on this guy’s evidence, right?”

“Right.”

“They couldn’t challenge him, right?”

Volchek sighed. “Right. What’re you getting at?”

“I’m going to obliterate the expert’s evidence, and you’re going to give me a chance to win this case without making Little Benny into soup.”

I told Arturas to let Volchek read Goldstein’s paper. He flicked through the article on Arturas’s iPhone, and cigar ash fell over the screen.

“This is nothing. How does this help?”

“Leave that to me. If I wipe the floor with this guy, you’ve got to give me a shot at Benny. I’ll do whatever it takes to save my daughter. She’s my world, my life, and I’ll go to jail to protect her. But I’m not relishing spending the rest of my life in an eight-by-six. Give me a shot at Benny. Let me cross-examine him, and if it doesn’t go well, I’ll press that button and blow him to hell myself.”

The first rule of the hustler’s bible—give the people what they want.

Before he whipped his head around to Arturas, I saw fire in Volchek’s eyes. He didn’t want to have to blow up a witness in live court. The risk was huge. Running was just as big a risk. He’d given up all hope of winning this case a long time ago. And I was giving that hope back to him.

“There is no chance you can win this case, lawyer. Better, smarter lawyers looked at all of this before,” said Arturas.

“It doesn’t cost you anything to let me try. At least with Goldstein, I have no choice. I’ve got to work on his evidence or your boss loses his bail.”

The room became silent. I could hear Victor’s heavy breathing. The hum from the photocopier fans. A car horn outside. Volchek wanted this, I could tell. I was the answer to his prayers.

“There’s one more thing,” I said.

“What?” barked Arturas.

“You haven’t brought me my coffee yet,” I said.

Tipping the ash from his cigar onto the floor, Volchek said, “Victor, get Mr. Flynn some coffee.”

CHAPTER TEN

Lunch had taken an hour and fifteen already.

I checked my watch and saw twenty-six hours left on my clock. The watch was a twenty-dollar digital with an LCD display. Cheap, nasty, and I loved it more than any other watch that I’d ever owned. Amy and I shared the same birthday—September first. I had picked her up on the morning of our last birthday and taken her shopping. Christine and I had been separated since late June. I’d felt awkward going to the house in Queens that I’d once shared with my family, and Amy and I went out instead. I’d had no idea what to buy for a ten-year-old, so I thought she should pick something out. As we passed a little jewelry store off Broadway, I felt Amy tugging at my sleeve. In the store window she saw digital watches for sale. We went in and she said she wanted two exactly the same—one for me and one for her. I told her I already had a watch, a gift from her mom. She put her mane of white-blond hair on the glass counter and studied the watch she’d chosen. Christine often worried about how serious our daughter could be; I hadn’t listened. I thought Amy was just more mature than most girls her age and that she had an adult’s intelligent curiosity.

Amy curled her little fingers around the watch and said, “Daddy, you’re going to stay with the doctors to get better, right?” She was talking about the residential alcohol clinic that I’d tentatively signed up for, at Christine’s insistence. The store clerk walked in back, giving us some room.

She whispered the rest of her plan, like it was our secret. “Well, I thought if we both got these watches, we could set the alarms for eight o’clock. Then you would remember to call me and we could like, talk, or you could, like, read me a story, or something.”

She was so sincere, so earnest. And although she was tall for her age, and impossibly cute and even mischievous at times, the beauty in her heart shone out of her in everything that she did. Her kindness saved my life that day; if we hadn’t bought those watches on our last birthday, I wouldn’t have made it through rehab. Every night, our alarms went off simultaneously at eight, and I called her. I had called her from the clinic, and I had read
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
to her over the phone. She was much better at being a daughter than I was at being a parent.

Sitting at the defense table, I tried not to play with my pen; it made me look nervous. Jean had left Goldstein’s ARAE paper on my chair.

This judge took her sweet time because she could. The courtroom largely consisted of reporters. Due to the perceived threat on the life of Witness X, there would be no televised coverage of this trial, just print reporting. Judges were always sensitive when it came to cameras in the courtroom. Most didn’t like being filmed and would happily rely on any old reason to exclude the cameras. There wasn’t even any CCTV in the courtrooms. No judge wants to be recorded saying something stupid when they’re off their guard.

I could sense the anticipation in the room. Everyone who’d heard Miriam’s opening knew this was a no-hoper of a defense case. The Asian gang leader that I’d seen earlier was already shaking his head, wondering what the delay was. Surely Volchek should have been found guilty by now.

I couldn’t think about Amy any longer. If I did, I’d go crazy. Volchek sat beside me in the defendant’s seat. Arturas and Victor were behind us.

I swallowed back my emotions, my fear, my doubts, and I turned to look at the menacing face of my client.

“Where’s my daughter?”

“She’s close by, and she is well. I check in from time to time. She’s eating potato chips and watching TV. You keep doing okay, maybe I let you see another photo,” said Volchek.

Another few minutes passed and there was still no sign of the judge. My opening speech would be simple, but my cross-examination of Dr. Goldstein worried me. I played the cross-examination in my mind—question, answer, question, answer, over and over, trying to perfect my style.

“You,” said Volchek. “I hope this delay is not down to you.” He wore an accusatory look. Running a persuader on this guy would be tougher than I’d imagined.

“You know, my father was a war hero,” continued Volchek. He looked at the ornate ceiling of the courtroom as he recalled his parent. “He killed a whole sniper team single-handed in battle of Stalingrad. Stalin decorated him personally. My mother was a Polish Jew, liberated from the camps, and she fell in love with my father—the hero.” His features softened as he thought of his mother, and his voice seemed to drop and drift in tandem with his recollections. “She gave me the name ‘Olek.’ It means
protector
. She didn’t live long after the war.”