Authors: Stephen Solomita
Bad Lawyer
A Novel
Stephen Solomita writing as David Cray
For Otto Penzler who came looking, twice
Prologue
T
HIS IS A BOOK
about love. Ferocious love, jealous love; love that excluded all but the lovers, love that reserved the traditional virtues of duty and honor to itself alone. I know I’m putting the cart before the horse, beginning my final argument before presenting the evidence, but questions of guilt or innocence are without meaning here, a point that needs to be made early on by a man already judged.
There were three lovers in this triangle, a curiously asexual
menage à trois
that maintained itself through a tyranny of memory, a pure terror of the past. We had no real leader, though I, with my personal narcissism (not to mention my fuck-you attitude) was the most obviously visible. But I was never, as some have suggested, the puppet-master, not with coconspirators as tough and powerful as Caleb Talbot and Julia Gill.
I begin, naturally, with myself, Sidney Itzhak Kaplan, third generation American Jew, born in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, in the year 1944, raised in Sheepshead Bay, also Brooklyn. My paternal great-grandfather, Hyman Baruch, hit these shores in 1879, along with his young wife, Esther, and quickly set up housekeeping in a basement room on Norfolk Street in Manhattan. Unable to find steady work, Hymie became the proverbial wandering Jew, loading his rented wagon with everything from pots to perfume to spectacles, working the towns of New Jersey and Pennsylvania, absent (so I was told again and again) for months at a time.
My grandfather, Itzhak (who lived in our house after his wife, Ethyl, died) was born in 1898, the last of nine children. By that time, Hyman had moved his family to the relative splendor of an old-law tenement on Hester Street. The family—mother, father, and six surviving kids—lived in the second and third of four rooms. The last room, the windowless cube at the end of the line, was reserved for the cutting and sewing of shirtwaists. Summer and winter, a huge stove in the front room glowed red-hot to keep the pressing irons heated. My grandfather carried a thick, rubbery scar on his left arm, a souvenir of that stove.
In 1899, a year after my Grampa Itzy’s birth, his father disappeared. Itzy’s brother, Nathan, the oldest at sixteen, was dispatched to find him. What Nathan found was a grave outside the town of Tranquility in northwestern New Jersey, and a story about a Jew kicked in the chest by his horse. Nathan, ever the good son, dug up the body in an effort to make an identification.
“Sidney,” Grampa Itzy told me six decades later, “the stiff’s shirt was made by my own
hands.
’”
Grampa Itzy, who’d been less than a year old when his father disappeared, had tiny, black eyes that glowed whenever he leaped into hyperbole. The next part of it, though, had passed into history; it was believed absolutely by dozens of assorted aunts, uncles, and cousins. “Even with all the decay, Nathan could see they had shaved our father’s head. Also the beard. The beard was missing.”
As time went on, the children married and moved out. Grampa Itzy was the last to go, marrying Ethyl Pearlman in 1920. By that time he was already the proud owner of a men’s clothing store on Grand Street between Orchard and Ludlow.
“I was famous up and down the Lower East Side. A
macher,
yes, but also a
mavin
with a needle.” At this point he would raise his tea-glass to his lips, the gesture at once coy and calculating. “For Meyer Lansky, I made all his suits. Also for Albert Anastasia.” Then he’d sip, swallow, lower the glass to his lap. “In them days we was all the same. The Jews, the Italians, it didn’t make no difference. You got a little money, you wanted to look good.”
My father, David Baruch Kaplan, was born in 1921, the first of three children, the others girls and married off just after Pearl Harbor. David Baruch, in the great patriarchal tradition, was given the family business on a platter. He was brought into the store at age ten, his fortune supposedly made, only to crash, head-on, into the Great Depression, his patrimony amounting to a decade of twelve-hour days in a nearly empty store.
The experience soured him, left him bitter and cynical, unable to enjoy the lucky accident that finally brought prosperity. Drafted into the army shortly after Pearl Harbor, David broke his leg in basic training, a piece of good fortune that left him with a slight limp and a jump start on the rest of his generation.
My father and grandfather were angry, belligerent men, as am I. They had excuses; I don’t. Yet, in what was fast becoming the family tradition, I fought my way through high school, psychologically as well as physically, a touchy kid left to stand alone by the schoolyard fence. My best (and only) friend was a Catholic school boy named Vinnie Barrone who spoke out of the side of his mouth, an act of homage to his convict father.
My summers were spent in the store, sweeping the floors, dusting the mannequins, stocking the shelves, though my father made it clear that I would never walk in his shoes. Or sell them, either. “Sidney,” he told me on the day after my
bar mitzvah,
“the Lower East Side is going to the dogs.” By which he meant the Puerto Ricans. “And I don’t have the energy to move the business. Besides which, the department stores’ll ruin us in the long run no matter what.” He shook his head, leaned back against a free-standing counter piled with shirts. “What I’m gonna do is put away enough money so that me and your mother should be comfortable in our old age. But you, Sidney, you gotta find another way.”
My way, though I couldn’t have spelled it out even while it was happening, was Brooklyn College (at the time free and predominantly Jewish), then Brooklyn Law School on a scholarship. I graduated third in my class, a lanky, scowling young man who yearned for the courtroom, for combat, for a test of wills that could be measured by words like guilty and innocent.
Two weeks after being admitted to the bar, I went to work in the Manhattan D.A.’s office, passing from gofer to the elite Homicide Unit to private practice in less than seven years. Over the next twenty-plus years, I represented some of the worst criminals in New York, low- and high-level mob figures, drug dealers with briefcases full of banded hundreds. I had the Rolex, the pinky ring, the 450SL, the co-op on Central Park West, the summer house on Fire Island. I had a suite of offices on Broad Street in lower Manhattan, a stable of hard working subordinates who didn’t object to my stealing the glory, the kind of celebrity that brought a table at the Four Seasons without suffering the indignity of phoning ahead for a reservation.
Then it all went bad, seemingly overnight, though I now realize the process took several years. From my clients’ point of view, the decline meant no more than Sid Kaplan loses cases, that defendants defended by Sid Kaplan not only go to prison, but (as Sid Kaplan is personally hated by sentencing judges) routinely feel the weight of the proverbial thrown book. From my point of view, it was a soul and body destroying combination of alcohol and cocaine that allowed my fifty-plus body to work sixteen-hour days, seven days a week, that left me befuddled by the complexities of courtroom procedure. By the time I gave it up and went into rehab for a year, I was buying cocaine by the ounce, consuming it (along with quarts of Chivas) as fast as I could put it into my body, floating half the time, as high from the fatigue as from the drugs.
At first glance, Caleb Jesse Talbot, born in the town of Brantley, Alabama, in the year 1941, the only child of Zacariah and Rose Talbot, seemed an utterly harmless man. Under five-ten, more than three hundred pounds, the starched collars of his white shirts cut into his jowls, the edges disappearing under a wave of ebony flesh. He had eyes, Caleb did, that protruded (the result of a thyroid condition, so he insisted) as if pushed from inside by the double whammy of his collar and his tightly knotted tie.
I don’t know where Caleb went for the jackets he inevitably wore, but unlike his shirts, they somehow managed to accommodate his enormous shoulders and back, his equally enormous belly and ass, without buttons flying like sprinkled corn in a microwave. Similarly, his sharply creased black trousers fell smoothly over his buttocks and thighs, then dropped in a straight line to brush the tops of his tasseled loafers. Caleb had tiny feet and hands; his fingers were thick and of equal length, his square, pink palms curiously unlined. His face was unlined as well, the skin puffed out in a smooth, often rippling sheet that overpowered his small nose and pursed mouth.
Caleb liked to play the “good cop” to my “bad cop” whenever I needed to get the truth from my lying clients and their lying witnesses. He had a name for the persona he adopted at these times, calling it Uncle Zeke, after a Brantley relative with a special talent for the bow and scrape.
Caleb could summon Uncle Zeke at will. I use the word “summon” because Uncle Zeke was not what Caleb Talbot’s life had been about.
The Talbot family rode north on the great wave of black immigration that followed WWII, settling on 168th Street near Amsterdam Avenue in the winter of 1951. Zacariah found work driving a bus for the Transit Authority while Rose hiked across the Alexander Hamilton Bridge each day to clean apartments in nearby Morris Heights. Caleb did well at school, excelled in athletics, had numerous girlfriends, managed to resist the temptations of the street. When he applied for the NYPD after a two year stint in the army, his record was squeaky clean. This was an absolute necessity, or so Caleb assured me, for a black recruit in 1963.
“They checked me good. Checked my record, in the Army and out, visited my neighbors, my high school teachers, lookin’ to sniff out any hint of a reason to dump my application.” A pause, then, followed by a grim smile. “Course, they missed the stranger. In those days, I never showed nobody the stranger.”
The stranger was Caleb Talbot’s name for the part of his being that craved alcohol, a specter that first came to perch on his shoulders after a high school party. Caleb had very broad shoulders, but the stranger was insatiable.