The Intruder (26 page)

“Why do you think these detectives are seeking to question you?” asks Susan.

Right. Straighten up. You are the defendant here. Tell your potential new lawyer what she might need to know.

“Well, one of them told me he had sworn statements and physical evidence linking me to the scene of a homicide. Maybe two homicides.”

He sits back and waits for the whistle or the sharp intake of
breath. But after fifteen years prosecuting murderers and sex offenders at the Manhattan DA’s office, Susan Hoffman doesn’t rattle that easily. In 1940s movies, they would have called Susan a tough broad. But she looks less like Barbara Stanwyck than a debauched math teacher. A smoker’s prematurely wrinkled face, small eyes, and a tight bitter mouth. She’d whipped Jake soundly twice in one year in state court. Once when he was at Legal Aid representing a Haitian marijuana dealer and then six months later after he’d gone into private practice, representing a petulant twenty-six-year-old stockbroker named Paul Martin III, who was running a cocaine business on the side. The cops lied blatantly in both cases, but each time the juries were out for less than half a day.

So when Susan bumped into Jake at Alison on Dominick earlier this year and said she was going into private practice, he told himself that if he was ever in trouble, she’d be his second choice to be his lawyer after Andy.

“Have you spoken to anyone else about this?” she asks.

“Well, Andy Botwin was supposed to be looking into it for me, but I guess he’s a little preoccupied these days.”

“Andy Botwin.” She lights a cigarillo and snorts two jet streams of smoke out of her nose. “Was he too busy going on the Letterman show?”

“It was a disappointment. Particularly since it’s a matter of some urgency.”

Susan looks distracted for a moment. “You know, goddamn it, I’ve had this hole in my stocking since this morning and I haven’t had a chance to change them.”

“What are you all dressed up for anyway?”

“Ah, my niece’s wedding tonight. Who ever heard of a wedding on a Sunday night? I have to meet Babs at six and go over to the temple.”

From the offhand way she says “Babs,” it’s clear she’s talking about a longtime girlfriend. Jake had never considered that Susan might be a lesbian before. Now he notices a certain butch cast to the decor: heavy brown furniture, thick navy curtains, and pictures of Susan mountain climbing next to her degrees on the
wall. On reflection, it doesn’t matter. He just wants a lawyer with six sets of teeth.

“All right, let’s establish some ground rules,” says Susan, snapping him back to attention. “I know you’re a good lawyer and I do want your input, but in this office, you’re the client. Understand?”

“Of course.”

Her mouth turns into a skeptical squiggle. “I’m going to need information from you. If you can’t tell me the truth, don’t tell me anything. You got that? I don’t want to hear the sky is green or the moon is made of Gorgonzola. Because that will only come back to haunt us in front of a jury, if God forbid this business ever comes to trial.”

“Couldn’t have said it better myself,” Jake tells her.

“I’m sure you have.” Her sharky little smile makes it clear that she hasn’t forgotten some of their sharper exchanges. “Do you still have that detective’s card?”

He takes it from the back pocket of his jeans and gives it to her, noticing his hand is shaking a little. Up until now, it’s all been lawyerly bantering. But now that she’s about to pick up the phone, he feels his guts revolting again, just as they did when he was talking to Detective Seifert on the sidewalk. This is not a joke. He’s being investigated for murder.

She lifts the receiver and he has to fight the urge to ask her to put it down. Is it too late to turn back and return to the life he had before? He realizes that he must have had a few hundred clients who’d asked themselves the same question at this very moment.

She dials the number, holding the cigarillo between her middle and index fingers, and asks for Detective Marinelli in a voice used to giving orders. When the detective gets on the line, she introduces herself with a kind of stern familiarity. Jake wonders if she might have worked with this cop before. His heart lightens. Maybe there’s a way to work this out without the investigation going any further. He’s glad he came to this office.

“Detective, I understand you’ve been attempting to speak to Mr. Jacob Schiff,” she says. “You mind telling me why that is?”

A pause. Susan drums her short wrinkled-up fingers idly over the hole in her stocking. She blows a line of smoke at the ceiling and her eyes rise dreamily to follow it.

“Look,” she says abruptly. “This can be a short friendly conversation or we can make it difficult. What do you have?”

There’s a series of short “uh-huhs” out of Susan and then a long grim look across her desk to Jake.

“Well, be advised that Mr. Schiff now has a new lawyer and you’re not to try speaking to him unless I am present. You’re not to try calling him directly or showing up at his house ...” She frowns in concentration as she listens to the detective’s reply. “Yes, of course, I understand it’s a criminal investigation. Who do you think you’re talking to?”

Jake’s heart has turned into a bowling ball, slowly sinking down toward his stomach.

“And the same to you, I’m sure, sir,” says Susan, slamming the phone down.

The rush of confrontation has brought a glow to her cheeks and warm life to her blue eyes. She puts her feet up on her desk and rubs her ankles together. Jake wonders if arguing is a turn-on for her.

“I’ll send him a follow-up letter, repeating what I just said,” she tells Jake. “I always find it’s better to put these things in writing.”

“Right,” he says numbly.

“The detective says they want to talk to you in connection with the killing of a homeless man in Riverside Park.”

“He only mentioned one?”

“He only mentioned one. My impression is a grand jury may have already been convened. Can you tell me anything about it?”

“Perhaps.” Jake hesitates, not sure where to begin.

As a lawyer, he’s had to browbeat his clients into learning a basic lesson: never discuss the details of a case directly, even with your attorney. Never say, “I killed the bitch.” Always: “The police say I killed the bitch.” Keep your lawyer out of ethical trouble and avoid committing perjury if you’re called to testify. But Jake finds he just can’t get comfortable on this side of the fence.

Sensing his uneasiness, Susan puts down her cigarillo. “Maybe before we get into any of the details, we should discuss the price of justice.”

Jake looks up at her, like a dog facing a rolled-up newspaper. “How much?”

“My fee is fifty thousand dollars, plus twenty-five hundred a day if it goes to trial.”

She holds his gaze for a few seconds before her composure begins to dissolve and an embarrassed smile begins to tug at the corners of her mouth.

“You know what?” says Jake, “I’ll give you fifty. But it’s worth more.”

“You think so?”

“Yes. And you’ll never be a top-ranked criminal attorney until you go home and practice saying, ‘My fee is one hundred thousand dollars,’ into the bathroom mirror without cracking up.”

She begins to chuckle and for the first time he feels a human connection with her.

“So do I get a break for giving you good advice?” he asks.

Her smile fades. “Just write me a check for what you have right now. I understand if you need time to raise the rest.” Her cigarillo smolders in the ashtray. “Now what else can you tell me about this case?”

47

Yo, what time is it?” the man with the hard round gut asks.

“I don’t know.” John G. can’t bear to look at him.

A jaundice-yellow sun over 145th Street. Hardly any traffic. Locked-up storefronts. Four gray men stand on the sidewalk, looking down at their feet.

The regular Narcotics Anonymous meeting was canceled at the Interfaith Volunteers Center, so John G. and three other homeless men have been sent to an uptown meeting. However, the people running it haven’t arrived yet with the keys.

“You got to put jelly to jelly,” says the man with the round gut, who calls himself Mao.

“So are they coming or not?” asks John, standing next to him and staring at the corrugated gate pulled over the front of the clinic. “They’re supposed to be open at two-thirty.”

Over these last few days, he’s been struggling to replace the orderliness of the drug addict’s life—scoring, smoking, bugging, chilling—with the orderliness of the recovery cycle. He keeps telling himself that every meeting, every clinic counts. If one gets canceled, he feels despondent and in danger of falling into bad old habits.

Stay clean. Easy does it. One day at a time. He’s trying to keep all the NA slogans in his head.

The other three guys stamp their feet and sniffle quietly. A man
walks by in a white Muslim skullcap, talking on a cellular phone. John G. wonders idly about the effect of all those radio waves going through the air.

“You got to put smelly to smelly,” says Mao.

“Say, you wanna go get a beer?” says the man standing to the left of John, a stout coffee-colored man named Charles Harris, who claims he was once a cop in Nassau County.

“Nah, you know. I start drinking, the medication doesn’t work as well.” John shuffles his feet.

“Yo, come on, man. Let’s just split a forty.”

“Nah, they’re gonna be open any minute.”

He’s beginning to wonder if he should spend so much time hanging around people like Charles, who are always trying to get him high.

Two women walk by with white Muslim scarves covering their heads and faces.

“You got to put belly to belly,” says Mao, wiggling his big gut at them. “Say sisters! What time is it?”

“Yo, shut up, fool,” says Charles Harris. “Their man hear you talk like that, he’ll come on over here and stomp your head with them big old Muslim feet. They leave a treadmark on your face, just say
Property of Allah.”

The man on the far left, who’s freakishly thin like a sideshow contortionist, opens his eyes for the first time in five minutes.

“I tell you what happened the other night?” he says. “I was hanging out behind Saks Fifth Avenue going through the Dumpsters, right? So this limo pulls up and this old white guy gets out, dressed real nice. Right? So he goes up to the Dumpster next to mine and starts going through it with his white gloves. And I’m like, ‘What’s up with that?’ Right? He says, ‘Fifty-seven years ago, I was living like a bum and I found two bags of cash in this garbage.’ Two thousand dollars, man. Started his whole business. Launched his career. So now every Friday night, he comes back to see if they make the same mistake.”

“So what’s your point?” asks John G.

“Anything could happen on the street, you hang out long enough.”

“Yo, what time is it?” asks Mao.

“Say, fuck this shit, man,” Charles Harris interrupts, poking his tongue into the right side of his cheek and then the left. “Let’s go get high. These people ain’t coming. They probably got car trouble. They’re stuck on the LIE. They don’t care about us.”

Another strong gust of wind blows down 145th Street, taking garbage and grit in its wake.

“I wanna hang out,” John G. demurs. “They ought to be here any minute.”

It’s hard putting things back together. All the connections that seemed so obvious on drugs are no longer there. Random displacement. Molecules pushing molecules. It doesn’t make quite as much sense anymore. He’s going to have to put the world back together the hard way. He’d gotten used to living like a dog and rummaging through garbage cans. Getting high whenever the urge hit. Now there’s all these rules to contend with. Having to shower every day, signing in for your bed, making meetings, taking your medication. Ms. Greenglass on your back all the time. No wonder you had so many guys bugging out from the stress.

“How’s long’s it been since you got high anyway?” asks Charles.

“I dunno. Two, three weeks.”

Easy does it. One day at a time. Since he stopped taking drugs, his teeth have started falling out and he only takes a shit about once every three days.

“So that’s long enough,” says Charles. “You been good. So come the fuck on. I got my man Marcus selling me jumbos on consignment. You smoke every tenth bottle and sell the rest, you got a habit that pays for itself. It’s a beautiful thing, man.”

“Nah, nah, I’m really trying to stop,” says John.

Charles pulls his face back, as if it’s a camera lens going for a wide angle. “What? You wanna smoke some cheeba? Is that what you’re trying to tell me? Don’t be shy. I’m down with that.”

“No, I’m trying to work on my steps, man.”

“Your steps?”

“Yeah, you know the Twelve Steps.”

Step Seven: We humbly asked God to remove our shortcomings.

“Yo, man, let’s ride on,” says Charles. “Let’s the four of us go around the corner, share a bottle of Brass Monkey. I used to help my man at the liquor store with his security. He’d give us a bottle on credit.”

“Yo, I asked what motherfuckin’ time it was,” says Mao with the big gut to no one in particular.

John’s heard enough. He turns on Charles. “Why can’t you just leave me the hell alone? Don’t I have enough problems? Why do you want to see me get high so badly? Am I making you nervous or something?”

Even as he says this, though, his resolve is weakening. Step One: We admitted we were powerless over drugs and alcohol—that our lives had become unmanageable. So fucking what? What difference would it make if he went around the corner and smoked a joint with Charles? Who else would he be hurting?

On the other hand, maybe he’s hurt enough people already. Step Eight: We made a list of all persons we harmed, and became willing to make amends to them.

He’s been thinking lately he’d like to see Margo again. It’s a good goal for him to concentrate on when he gets up in the morning. Instead of just figuring out how to waste the day getting high. He wants to stay focused on putting things back together. But he’s not sure if he’s ready to see her just yet. Maybe he has to build up to it.