The Intruder (41 page)

“I see. Can you describe them?”

Gates looks thoughtful and then startled, like he’s suddenly realized one of the men was Abraham Lincoln. “One of them was bigger than the other,” he says.

“Can you say more?”

“Hmm.” He looks around the courtroom, as if he’s making sure Philip isn’t there. “Well, uh, I guess the bigger one, he was older. He had, like, light-colored hair, you know. I didn’t get that good a look at him. Actually. Huh.” He seems to lose his place for a second. “He was kind of solid like.”

Jake looks at the judge. He’s massaging his temples. Is he buying this or getting ready to throw it out? It’s hard to tell. The vagueness of the description might actually work in Jake’s favor, as it shows the witness wasn’t overly coached. On the other hand, there seems to be a thickening cloud of ozone forming around the witness stand, as Gates grows more tentative in his answers.

“The other guy was smaller,” he’s telling the judge and Susan. “I don’t remember much about him. Except he had a baseball bat. I remember the baseball bat.”

He touches his midsection where he got walloped and then jerks his head back. He doesn’t seem assured that Philip isn’t there. Instead, he stares at a bald moustachioed attorney named Howard Jaffee sitting in the back row, as if he’s a potential conduit to Cardi.

“Can you describe what happened that night?” Even Susan’s sounding tense. “What did the men say to you and Mr. Collingwood?”

“Jeez.” Gates’s eyes open wide and his jaw goes slack. Where to begin? “I remember Mr. Schiff over there, he told me to leave his family alone.”

“And then what happened?”

“They attacked both of us with the baseball bats. They hit Abraham over the head with the bat. Then there was a spark and that was it.”

“Right. But what was said before that?”

“I just told you, he said, ‘Leave my family alone,’ “ Gates says, turning testy.

“But what did the other men say?” Susan asks, with carefully measured patience.

“How the hell should I know?”

The judge’s fingers stop their massaging. He looks directly at Susan, as if he’s about to ask whether this should be declared a hostile witness.

Gates begins to list to the left. “There were words,” he says in a flatter voice.

“What kind of words?” says Susan, struggling to get back on track.

“They . . . He ...” He stops, grimaces, and looks up. He seems surprised to find himself in the witness box. “They had words with each other.”

Jake is no longer watching from the analytical lawyer’s perspective. His heart is on a bungee cord.

“It’s hard for me to think of it all . . . It was dark down there . . .”

“To the best of your recollection,” Susan says evenly.

Gates’s mouth goes one way. His eyes go the other. “I dunno. I dunno.”

He’s still struggling with that invisible presence.

“Mr. Gates. Please. Try.”

“They said something, then Abraham said something.” He appears as much annoyed with himself as with Susan. “Then they jumped us with the bats and there was the spark. That was it.”

This won’t work. “What about Philip blinking the flashlight?!” Jake scrawls on his legal pad. If he mentions that in subsequent testimony, it will seem like an inconsistency. But it’s too late. Susan is too busy trying to bail out the sinking boat of this testimony to look his way.

“Was Mr. Schiff one of the people who attacked you?”

Gates looks over warily, as if he’s never seen Jake before. He starts to say something that sounds like “yeah,” but then catches himself.

“He didn’t have a bat,” he says. “The others had them. He didn’t.”

An unexpected moment of relief. Jake rubs his aching eyes. At least Gates doesn’t have him leading the charge. But only one wheel of the plane is down on the runway. The fact that Jake was standing there still makes him party to the assault and the homicide.

“Mr. Gates,” says Susan, taking a long beat, “do you recall if Mr. Schiff actually tried to prevent the attack?”

A large bubble of saliva forms between Gates’s lips. It lingers for a moment and then breaks. “Yeah, okay,” he says unconvincingly, as if making a deal with his invisible adversary. “He tried to stop it.”

“Do you recall his exact words?” Susan tries to strengthen his resolve.

“What?”

“Do you recall the exact words or gestures he made to halt the attack?”

John G. stares at her as if she were an eighteen-wheeler bearing down on him. His lips move but no words come out.

“Mr. Gates?”

He reaches for his water glass, but his palsied shaking is too much. The water is leaping over the sides and splashing over the rail before him. He’s having some kind of breakdown right here on the stand.

“Would you like me to repeat the question?”

Gates’s whole body is shivering and his lips appear blue.

He mutters something that sounds like “I don’t even wanna be here.”

Jake is looking hard at him from counsel’s table twenty feet away, but he can’t get Gates’s attention. His chest tightens and his left arm goes numb. Is he about to have a heart attack right here in the courtroom?

“Mr. Gates? Could you please answer the question?”

A harsh noon sun slants through a window high on the courtroom wall. Gates turns and blinks into the white light, as if reconsidering something. He still doesn’t answer.

A clerk drops some papers into the judge’s basket. A phone rings in the background.

“Anything else, Ms. Hoffman?” asks the judge.

“Not unless you got any good ideas,” says Susan.

“So on a scale of one to terrible, how do you think we did?” Jake asks, trying to catch his breath and get the feeling back in his arm in the hallway afterward.

“Almost completely terrible.”

For the first time, Susan is starting to look depressed. Dark circles ring her eyes and her lips look dry and ragged.

“If I were Francis, I might even skip the cross-examination,” she says. “He’s already made it to the barn. The judge sees Gates is a space cadet. All Francis has to do is put his homeless guy, Taylor, up on the stand and have him avoid saying he’s Gandhi.”

“You think he’ll leave it at that?” Jake asks.

A knowing, wary smile cracks the dry lips. “No way. I’ve worked with guys like Francis all my life. Everything’s win, win, win and football metaphors with them. It’s not enough for them to make it into the end zone. He’s gotta spike the ball and do the dance.”

“Good,” says Jake. “Then we stand a chance.”

Francis begins his questioning coolly. He asks Gates about his history of arrests, drug taking, and sessions with psychiatrists. He even breaks out the transcript of the Mental Hygiene hearing and the police complaint Jake swore out against him. Oddly, the more hostile questions are, the more focused and aware Gates seems.

“Why do you think he would call you a menace?” Francis asks.

“Maybe he didn’t really know me,” Gates says with the beginnings of a sweet smile.

This kind of comeback doesn’t sit well with Francis. He somehow decides Gates isn’t respecting him, so he steps up the attack.

“Isn’t it true that when you were living on the street, you went around telling people you were being pursued by parasites and flesh-eating ghouls?” Francis asks, studying a new sheath of papers.

“Just parasites.”

The judge laughs out loud. Francis grows rigid and tight lipped.

“Didn’t you almost cause a major subway collision because you thought you saw someone standing on the tracks?”

“That was before I started taking my medication.”

“Well, Mr. Gates,” Francis says. “You’ve already testified under oath that you’ve been a crack addict, a mental patient, and a person who’s experienced hallucinations when you fail to take your medication. Why should we believe your account of what went on in the tunnel the night of September fifth?”

“Because I’m telling the truth.”

“I see.” Francis turns away, running his tongue over his upper lip. “Did it ever occur to you that you might not know what the truth is?”

Gates gives the judge a quizzical look as if to say, This is all getting too metaphysical. “Could you repeat the question?”

“How would you know what the truth is?” says Francis, spreading out his hands and making it as simple as possible.

Gates just stares at Francis’s hands and doesn’t speak for a long while. A side door squeaks. Jake looks at the empty jury box and then glances back at Dana, thinking you can never tell what’s going to happen in a courtroom.

“I never lie,” Gates says.

“Never?”

“I’ve eaten out of the garbage, I’ve slept on the street, I’ve robbed old ladies to get money for drugs. But I don’t lie.”

“I see.” Francis smiles thinly. “So did you take money for your daughter’s shoes and use that to buy drugs too?”

“No, I never did that.”

“But did you continue to take drugs after she was born?”

“Yeah,” Gates says sheepishly. “But not that many then. Just some speed to stay awake when I was doing double shifts and maybe a joint once in a while.”

Francis is pacing back and forth in front of him, lost in a kind of vicious rhythm. Jake recognizes it as the state he’d work himself into while he was trying to destroy a witness with hammer and tongs.

“So I guess you’d just steal grocery money to buy drugs and that wasn’t lying,” says Francis.

“No. I always told my wife when I was stealing it.”

The judge gets a laugh out of that, taking it as a Willie Sutton kind of line. For Gates, though, it’s just a matter of simple conviction. Francis’s posture grows ever more tense and resentful.

“Mr. Gates,” he says, drawing himself up with sneering disgust. “Would you have described yourself as a good father while your daughter was alive?”

Gates seems depressed by the question. “Yes. I guess so.”

“Even though you were taking drugs from the time she was born?”

“Yeah.”

Francis hitches up his pants and throws a half sneer at Jake. Watch me now, sucker. “Tell me, Mr. Gates, is it not a fact that you told city staff psychiatrists that you blamed yourself for her death?”

Gates stares down at his knees. “I felt that way for a long time.”

“And do you still feel that way?”

“I guess.”

Jake hunches his shoulders and glances back at Dana. She shrugs. She’d always suspected that was part of what was botheringjohn G., but he’d never told her so outright. Francis’s notes must be from a shrink who interviewed Gates right after he left the MTA. Damn, Jake thinks. Francis did his homework on this witness.

“Can you tell us why? Why you blame yourself?”

Gates’s mouth twitches the way it did when Susan was questioning him. “It’s . . . it’s kind of hard to explain. I don’t know if it makes sense.”

“Why don’t you give it a try?” Francis smiles as if he’s doing John G. a favor.

Jake leans forward in his seat. Where is Francis going with this? Is he going to try to impugn the witness by blaming him for his own daughter’s death? It’s a risky strategy that might backfire with this judge.

“I was working all these double shifts,” Gates begins slowly. “Because we were gonna move and needed the money. I started doing a lot of speed so I could stay up all the time. Also—you know, I’m trying to be honest here—I still kinda liked getting high ...” He stops and puts a hand over his chest.

“Go on.”

Francis seems pleased with the way the witness is rambling. There’s a destination, though, and he’s leading Gates there.

John G. blinks to rouse himself. “So my wife,” he says, “she was getting all stressed because she was the only one with the baby most of the time and she was still working a few days a week at the DMV. And instead of day care, she ended up leaving Shar with her sister Jo once in a while. Because it was family.”

“Her sister was a junkie. Is that correct?”

“Yeah.”

“She was present with you at the time of your daughter’s death. Isn’t that right?”

Gates closes his eyes and then opens them, as if there’s something he doesn’t want to see in front of him. “Yeah.”

“For which you blame yourself. Correct?”

Long pause. “I blame myself.”

He sits in the witness box, with his head thrown forward and his shoulders shaking slightly.

The judge looks at Francis sideways, as if to say, All right, you’ve made your point.

The accident, Jake thinks. We should have thought more about the accident. Rolando had only discovered the truth about it within the last few days. Gates and his wife left their daughter at her sister Jo’s apartment in the Kingsbridge section of the Bronx. They must have known it was a bit of a risk, but they were both working, and in the later reports the Child Welfare people agreed the sister was a good soul within the narrow parameters of junkiedom. What happened wasn’t really anyone’s fault.

They were just crossing the street at dusk, that was all. Going from one side of Bailey Avenue to the other, where her daddy was waiting for her after work. The light was green and then it turned red. The little girl let go of her aunt’s hand and went running to her father. And a Pechter Fields bakery truck going forty miles an hour knocked her down. That was all. Just an everyday accident. The little girl insisted on getting up and trying to walk again before she collapsed again. She died from internal injuries at North Central Bronx Hospital. The aunt killed herself with a drug overdose three months later.

Up on the stand, Gates is absolutely coming apart. The shaking shoulders have given way to crying. His fingers wriggle on the railing. And his face turns bright red.

“See what happened was, the light was green before it turned red,” he says, trying to continue. “And I keep thinking maybe if I’d just gone then and crossed the street, I could’ve gotten her. But instead I just stood on the corner. ‘Cause I was watching her and thinking how lucky I was. She was so beautiful. My life was so beautiful . . . And then it was over. I had her in my arms and then she slipped away.”

Tears are streaming down his face. Jake looks back and sees Dana is crying too. Maybe they should just ask for a recess before the witness completely self-destructs.