The Guilty Plea (22 page)

“She’s going to push like hell for a deal. She’ll tell me how overwhelming the evidence is against you.”

Wyler hung her head.

DiPaulo picked up a silver letter opener his wife had given him for his law school graduation. It was engraved with his initials but the letters were fading. Silver, he’d learned, like gold was a soft metal.

“What would I get for manslaughter?” Wyler asked, still looking down.

He was glad she’d brought up the topic. “The math is brutal. First-degree murder, which is a planned and deliberate killing, the sentence is twenty-five years. Mandatory. No parole. You’re thirty-five. That means you’ll be sixty when you get out. Sixty years old.”

She started to cry. “It’s unbelievable.”

“Second-degree is a minimum of ten years.”

She wiped the tears away and looked at him. “I couldn’t have another baby. Simon would never talk to me again.”

“Manslaughter’s the last alternative. There’s no minimum sentence, and you could get out on parole after one-third of your time. I’d ask for six to eight years on a plea to manslaughter.” He watched her closely. She was still staring at the floor. DiPaulo put down the letter opener, determined to wait her out.

“Six years?” she asked at last.

Clients only heard the lowest number. He’d deliberately given her the best possible news to get a foot in the door. Time now to drag her inside, kicking and screaming if necessary.

“I said I’d ask for six to eight. The Crown won’t want you to plead to manslaughter. If the judge really twists their arm, they might take a plea. But for a much bigger number.”

“Bigger?”

“They’ll want at least fifteen. Probably more.”

“Fifteen.” She writhed in her chair. “Fifteen? Simon’s only four years old.”

“Samantha, listen. I’ll tell you again. Manslaughter, you can get parole in a third of the time. Second-degree murder—”

“I know, I know. Ten years minimum, twenty-five for first-degree. Still—”

“It’ll be up to the judge. I’ll tell her how well you’ve done on bail.”

“If I plead, I’ll never get to see my son again,” she said.

“You don’t know that for sure. Feindel’s an excellent family lawyer. Maybe with time—”

“With time Simon will get older. You think when he’s a teenager he’s going to want to have anything to do with a mother who he thinks killed his dad?”

DiPaulo checked his office door to triple ensure it was closed, the way a nervous traveler checks and rechecks his passport in his breast pocket. This was a big step. She had almost confessed to him. Guilt, he knew, was a heavy burden to carry.

“I’m only a criminal lawyer.” He came around the desk and took his usual seat beside her. “My job is to make the best I can of this situation. I’m terrified you’ll be convicted of first-degree murder.”

She bit her lower lip and flicked her hair back. Teetering on the edge of her emotions.

“Twenty-five years,” he said.

Her breath was coming fast.

“I’m going into that pretrial tomorrow and I’ll fight for you,” DiPaulo said. If he was going to ride this horse—make the best possible deal on a guilty plea—this was the moment. “If the judge pushes them to offer me manslaughter, will you take it?”

“I … I—”

“I need an answer. Otherwise the Crown will go all the way.”

Wyler nodded a little.

“I’ll keep saying it until I’m sure you understand. Twenty-five years. You will be sixty years—”

“Okay,” she said in a voice so thin, so tentative that if his eyes were closed, DiPaulo would have thought she was a child. It wasn’t a lot, but it was enough.

“I’ll be there in five minutes,” Ari Greene said to his father, calling from his car when he was about a mile from his dad’s house. At last they had time to repaint the railing of his front porch.

“I need some new brushes,” his father said. “Can you pick up a few?”

“What’s wrong with the old ones?”

“They’re stiff.”

Greene chuckled to himself. His father hadn’t bought a paintbrush in a decade. Every few years Greene brought new ones over, which always provoked a slew of comments about how the old ones were good enough. “See you in about twenty minutes,” he said.

Instead of continuing north to the hardware store, Greene swung his Oldsmobile west, slipped through a few side streets, and parked a block away from the house he grew up in. He hopped out and walked to the old maple tree on the corner that he used to climb when he was a kid. “Ari, you never stop being a cop,” an old girlfriend had once told him. I guess it’s true, he thought as he hid behind the tree.

In a few minutes his dad’s old Buick pulled up to the stop sign and turned in the other direction. Mrs. Spiegel, one of the women who ran the synagogue sisterhood, was in the passenger seat. She’d been a widow for years.

Greene went back to his car and waited. It didn’t take long for the Buick to reappear. He followed it down his father’s little side street and parked behind it in the narrow driveway.

“I hear Mrs. Spiegel’s a good cook,” Greene said when they were both out of their cars.

“So, you didn’t get the brushes,” his father said.

Greene kissed his dad on the forehead. “Once a cop, always a cop, Dad.”

“Her husband died ten years ago.” His father shrugged. “I knew her from the DP camp.” After he was liberated, Green’s father had spent two years in the displaced persons camp in Austria. The third day there he met Chana, Greene’s mother. They were married four days later. “It’s not easy to find a man who still drives.”

Greene eyed his father. “As long as he stays off the highway.”

His father grimaced.

Greene looked at the paved driveway. There were cracks in the black asphalt and this past summer more weeds than ever had poked through. “You haven’t resurfaced this since I was a kid.”

“Your mother bothered me about it for years.” They walked together up the concrete front steps. His father pulled out a big ring of keys. He had three locks on both the front and the back doors which he also braced with a metal bar.

“The Portuguese family that moved across the street said they’d give me a good price.” He walked inside. “Leafs were terrible last night. Three goals against them in the first seven minutes. I told you that goalie from Finland would be a disaster.”

“He’s Swedish.”

“He stinks. What’s happening with your case?”

When Greene was on a murder, he’d talk to his dad about it. “Judicial pretrial’s tomorrow. Everyone else thinks it’ll be a guilty plea.”

“Except you?”

“Except me. And Kennicott. We’re both betting this will be a trial.” In the kitchen Greene pulled some dishes from his father’s dishwasher and put them in the cupboards. Since his mother died last year, Greene’s father used the dishwasher for storage. “Why bother putting them away?” he said every time Ari asked him about it, mixing English and Yiddish. “
Zaytki arbet
.” Which meant extra work. As far as his father was concerned, he’d already worked hard enough in his life.

“This family. The Wylers. What do they say?” his father asked.

“They want it over. They have an aggressive family lawyer who’s told them that if Samantha pleads guilty, even to manslaughter, she’ll never see her son again.”

Greene opened two tins of tuna and mixed them with mayonnaise while his father set the linoleum table in the kitchen. There was a dining room on the other side of the wall, but Greene couldn’t remember the last time they’d eaten there.

“The oldest brother, Nathan, was fooling around with his girlfriend the night this happened. I’m the only one who knows, and he wants to keep it that way. A guilty plea solves all his problems.”

“You haven’t told anyone this?”

“It’s not relevant,” Greene said. “His alibi is solid. I checked it out myself.”

His father brought out a pitcher of milk and two glasses. “But you think because of her son, this woman Samantha won’t plead.”

Greene bit into his sandwich. Last week he’d bought his dad some rye bread and it was hard. Should have toasted it, he thought.

“What did the husband do when he lived in the States?” His dad did this all the time, asked a series of seemingly unrelated questions. It was impossible to discern where he was going with them, but often they’d lead to a whole new way of looking at things.

Thanks to the Nazis, Yitzhak Greene had no formal education. On the evening of September 22, 1942, their little Polish village was surrounded, and half the people—the two thousand Jews who’d lived peacefully with their two thousand Catholic neighbors for hundreds of years—were rounded up and shipped to Treblinka. He and two others were the only survivors. His first wife and their two daughters were killed. If given the opportunity to go to school, his father could have been anything. But he never complained that he’d had to spend his life fixing other people’s shoes so he could raise a family.

“Went to college in Vermont.” Greene opened a jar of Strub’s pickles he’d brought to the table. “Stayed in the town when he graduated and ran his own health food store. Apparently he was good at it, made a lot of money.”

“He came back. Why?”

“They needed him. The middle brother couldn’t work anymore because of his disease. And he met his wife, Samantha, back here,” Greene said. “Dad, eat.”

His father was a slow eater. He’d weighed seventy-six pounds
when the Americans liberated him. And always left a bit of food on his plate. “He was away. How long?”

“Ten years.”

“Long time away from his family.”

At last Greene’s father bit into his sandwich. “Bread’s stale,” he said. “I should have toasted it.”

When she was going to court for a judicial pretrial and not a trial, Jennifer Raglan didn’t have to wear her robes. She knew Judge Norville well enough to know it was important to dress well, and besides, it felt good to put on a nice wool suit, great for a fall day, with a pin she’d inherited from her grandmother. On the weekend she’d had her hair cut and her roots touched up. There was this new lipstick she was trying, a softer red that worked well with her pale skin. And if the case settled, this could be one of the last times she’d see Ari Greene.

Even Gordon noticed when she came down for breakfast. “Luncheon date today?” he had asked, lowering the sports section of his newspaper.

She shook her head. “Pretrial with Judge Norville. She’s very formal. Hates it when lawyers are casual about anything.” There was no need to tell him that Ari Greene would also be at the courthouse today. There’d never been a reason to tell him anything about Greene.

“Well, you look good.” Gordon put down his paper, got up, and leaned over to kiss her.

She turned her mouth so he had to kiss her cheek. “Fresh lipstick,” she said by way of explanation.

“Good luck.” He sat down and disappeared behind his paper.

The best part of the outfit was her new pumps. She’d spent Sunday afternoon on Bloor Street with Dana, mother-and-daughter shoe shopping. It had been fun and she couldn’t resist this Italian pair. They made her feel tall and confident as they clicked on the floor leading to the door where, up ahead, Ted DiPaulo was chatting with the court officer who would usher them back inside to see the judge.

“Morning, Counsel.” The older man was in full uniform, complete with a row of badges and metals. “Her Honor’s expecting you.” He pushed some numbers on a code pad before taking them down a quiet carpeted hallway.

Every few steps they passed a different judge’s office. Big rooms, each with its own flooring and furniture. Judges hated to think of themselves as civil servants. As far as they were concerned, a judge was above the constraints and influences of government and they wanted their offices, which they referred to as chambers, to reflect their own individual styles.

“Good morning.” Norville looked up from her steel desk. The chambers of many of the older judges were rich in dark wood furniture and thick carpets. In contrast, every inch of Norville’s office was ultra-modern. The floor was covered in a thin, light gray carpet accented by swaths of color, like a horizontal version of a huge modern painting. Her gray desk was brushed steel. The two chairs in front were metal too, angular and fashionably uncomfortable.

Norville, out of her gowns, wore a gleaming cotton shirt under a tailored jacket. She had on stylish aqua blue glasses—not the boring brown-framed pair she wore in court—that matched the desk and the chairs and the flooring. Her hair had the consistent styling and streaks that could only be achieved with weekly appointments.

Raglan perched herself on the edge of the chair closest to the window. DiPaulo sat beside her.

Norville sighed. “I have all these forms to fill out if there’s going to be a trial.” She touched the stack of papers on her otherwise empty desk. How do people keep their offices so clean? Raglan wondered.

“First, let’s talk.” Norville took off her fancy glasses. They must have cost at least eight hundred dollars, Raglan thought, just for the frames. “I’m determined to do everything I can to try to avoid a trial.”

Judges loved settling cases. Not only did it save precious court time—the one commodity in their pampered lives that was in short supply—but it gave them status with their colleagues. Finding that magic middle point made them feel proud.

DiPaulo glanced at Raglan but didn’t say a word. They’d both taken the same negotiation skills training courses. Rule number one was keep your mouth shut, let the other side talk first.

Norville sensed the deadlock. “Okay,” she said, looking at DiPaulo. “Ted, you have a huge problem with this case. The e-mails, the voice mails, the Hollywood girlfriend—and that video with the child is going to bury you in front of the jury. You’ll be lucky if they don’t convict her of a first. Twenty-five years for a young woman like that.”

“It’s not the easiest case I’ve ever had, Your Honor.” DiPaulo put on his most charming smile. “My client isn’t entirely realistic.” He turned his face into a sad frown, as if to say “What can I do?” The message was clear: make me an offer Samantha Wyler can’t refuse.

Norville shook her head. “She needs a reality check. I haven’t heard a word about an alibi. Means she can’t testify. This is her one and only chance.”