Bad Lawyer (24 page)

I remember Ettamae dropping to her knees, folding gloved hands, starting to pray. I remember that clearly, but the rest of the day returns to me only in small fragments. At noon, four men heaved the coffin from the rolling platform on which it rested to a waiting hearse. A long train of cars followed the hearse as it made its way to the First Church of Christ, Pentecostal. Fourth in line, I rode next to a pair of restless children in the back seat of a green Buick. The service was long and very emotional, the choir well rehearsed, yet it was obvious that Reverend Powell had never met Caleb Talbot.

By six o’clock, I was strapped into a tiny seat in a tiny airplane. We were off the ground, banking away from Brantley and toward Mobile. Ettamae was sitting beside me, her cheeks wet.

“Why’d Caleb go up there, Sid?” she asked without preamble.

“Then you know about it?” I returned. “He told you about Priscilla and Guzman?”

“Yes, he did. And I was gonna tell the police, but I was afraid about Julie. Then Guzman got himself killed, so I just figured it didn’t matter.”

The skin of the plane was vibrating beneath my feet, the wing outside my window flapping wildly. Lightning flashed on the horizon. Ordinarily, I would have been terrified.

“To answer your question, Ettamae, I don’t know why Caleb and Julie went up to Washington Heights. Without doubt, I told them not to go. And when I left the office that afternoon, I was certain they’d stay put.”

She nodded once, then rummaged in her bag for a tissue. “Caleb,” she finally said, “he didn’t ever listen. That was his biggest problem. He always thought he knew exactly what to do.”

It took us six grueling hours to make New York, hours passed mostly in silence. I think, by the time we touched down at La Guardia, Ettamae was as numb as I was. She’d stopped crying somewhere outside of Raleigh-Durham, had taken a compact from her purse, repaired her makeup, accepted a drink from a concerned flight attendant. As we collected our luggage from the overhead rack, we promised to stay in touch, a promise neither of us expected to keep. I was looking forward to a quick ride back to my office, a shower in the tiny bathroom stall. Maybe I would even sleep.

Those plans evaporated a few minutes later when I caught sight of Sergeant Harold Knapp and his partner, Detective Brown, standing a few yards from the exit ramp. Knapp straightened, waved me over.

“Not you, Mrs. Harris,” he said after explaining that he’d gotten my schedule from Rebecca Barthelme. “I need to speak with the counselor.”

Ettamae looked at me for a moment, then, after a parting nod, drifted off.

“I guess this must be important, Knapp,” I said, “because you brought your dog along.”

Neither Brown nor his partner responded to the taunt, though Knapp took a moment before saying, “I think we found your girlfriend in the river. You wanna ride over to the morgue, take a peek?”

I should have seen it coming, of course, should have read the message in his flat smile, his empty stare. As it was, I stood there, speechless.

“Sure,” Brown said, “take a ride with us, save the cab fare. You like to save money, don’t ya?”

Knapp jumped in as if reading from a script. “We’re not sayin’ you gotta do it, counselor. Only thing, if we can’t make an identification, the city’s most likely gonna dump her in an unmarked grave.”

Instead of leading me down into the basement when we arrived at the morgue on First Avenue, Knapp and Brown took me to a small office on the second floor where I found two cops waiting. Knapp introduced them as Detectives Fisher and Brinkmann. “They’re workin’ the Guzman case,” he explained, “and they were hopin’ to ask you a few questions. Meanwhile, Brown and me’ll go downstairs, see if the body’s ready to view.”

Fisher did most of the talking. Like his partner, he was middle-aged, overweight, and rapidly balding.

“Looks like you’re famous,” he began, offering me a copy of
Newsday
.

I grunted, remembering a time when I’d welcomed fame, then quickly scanned the article. The reporter had it, from a trusted source within the NYPD as well as several drug dealers who wished to remain anonymous, that Elizado Guzman had been the primary cocaine supplier to Byron and Priscilla Sweet.

“Whatta ya think, Mr. Kaplan?” Fisher asked when I returned the paper. “Think they got it right?” He had a gray mustache that bristled above a mouth that turned down at the corners, making him look, to me at that moment, like a depressed walrus.

“Ask me a question that isn’t actually stupid,” I said. “I’ve been traveling for the last six hours and I don’t have the energy for stupid.”

Fisher and Brinkmann exchanged a significant cop look, then Fisher said, “You told Knapp you didn’t know how Guzman got your business card. Then you told a reporter that Guzman was a client. Which is it?”

“The latter.”

“Then why’d you tell Knapp …”

“I’m not gonna stand for an interrogation, Fisher. I’m much too tired.”

He nodded, scratched the back of his head. “Did Guzman tell you that he was in trouble?”

“What Guzman told me falls under the heading of attorney-client privilege.”

“Not if he’s dead. If he’s dead, he has no right to privacy.”

I took off my coat, folded it over my arm, finally sat down. “Do you really think he named his murderers, maybe left me a sealed envelope to be handed over in the event of his death?”

That brought an actual smile. “You mean he didn’t?”

“Afraid not. But I will say this: What you and your partner oughta be looking for is who Guzman bought drugs
from
, not who he sold them
to
. Priscilla Sweet, incidentally, has an alibi for the time of the murders.”

“That doesn’t mean she didn’t order it done.”

“Now we’re back to stupid.”

Knapp returned a few minutes later. “All ready,” he announced. When I didn’t move, he looked disappointed. “You wanna come downstairs or not?” he asked.

“What happened to the Polaroids?”

He shrugged, waited for me to get up, then led me to a small room in the basement. “Thing is,” he said as he pulled down the sheet, “there was a whole lotta ice on the river and Julia got a little beat up. You might have to look close to make an identification.”

The figure beneath the sheet, except for a few shreds of skin, had no face. Bits of the scalp remained, as did the lobe of one ear and both eyes, but the bones and cartilage of the nose were completely torn away.

“See, that part of the river has a hell of a current to it, so the ice formed in blocks instead of a solid sheet. Gill was trapped a few inches below the water and what I figure is that her head was a perfect target. For the ice, I mean.”

Something hardened inside me at that moment. I heard a door slam, understood it as the end of my fear, the end of any life I might actually want to live. The game would simply play itself out; the game would carry me along like a block of ice on a polluted river. There was no way out.

“I don’t know who this is,” I said without turning away. “It could be anybody.”

“That’s what I thought the first time I saw her. But then I found this locket.” He waited until I was facing him. “Right here, on the back, it says,
FROM SID WITH LOVE
.”

I
’M NOT SURE WHAT
Knapp was trying to accomplish. Maybe it was simple payback. I had information that might be useful, but wouldn’t give it up. He couldn’t force me to come clean, but he could deliver enough pain to make sure I didn’t forget him. If that was the case, then he got his wish because, though I never saw Knapp again, neither he nor his pink-eyed partner, images of Julie lying in the morgue, sometimes distorted by dreams, continue to haunt me. I do know that a month later, Fisher and Brinkmann charged three Jamaicans, all members of a Brooklyn posse, with the Guzman homicides. The case drew a lot of attention because the Jamaicans, whose names I can no longer recall, were prosecuted under New York’s death penalty statute. They were convicted of murder for hire after a typically contentious Bruce Cutler defense, but missed being part of history when the jury voted for life without parole instead of lethal injection.

In the days that followed my return to New York, I continued to plod along. The fingerprint evidence went by fax to Marilyn Tannhauser, an expert based in New Orleans, who responded within a few hours. The latent prints lifted from the murder weapon, she wrote, belonged to Priscilla Sweet and she, Marilyn, was not prepared to testify otherwise. Kim Park, to whom I faxed the autopsy and serology reports, was much more positive. If the prosecution, he told me by phone, wished to contend that Byron’s .42 blood alcohol level precluded his offering a threat, Dr. Kim Park would be delighted to present a thorough, jury-convincing refutation. Especially in light of the fact that I was now prepared to cover his fee.

“One other thing,” I said when he was through promoting himself. “The cirrhosis. Just how sick was Byron?”

“Without a liver transplant, I don’t believe he would have lived until summer.”

“Would his wife have known?”

“Without a doubt,” Kim replied. “There would necessarily have been acute episodes. Why don’t you check with his doctors?”

Rebecca Barthelme showed up on Sunday, stealing time from her family to present me with a new witness, a woman named Margaret D’Cassio. D’Cassio was important to us for a number of reasons, not the least of which that after a crisis of conscience, she’d sought us out. A college friend of Priscilla’s, Margaret had not only been witness to Byron’s abuse in the early years of their marriage, Byron had threatened to “kick her white ass up and down the block” when she attempted to interfere. That was enough for D’Cassio. A straight-arrow type who’d never taken drugs, she’d quickly declared her friend a lost cause and gotten on with her life.

“I’ve been carrying the guilt,” she told me, “for all these years.”

D’Cassio was a professor of Ancient Languages at New York University. She presented herself as a trim, immaculately groomed blond in a maroon skirt and matching bolero jacket over a starched white blouse. Her voice was deep and well modulated, her enunciation precise, as befitted a woman of her station. The jury would love her, especially because the violence she described was graphic and she’d taken the time to detail it in the journal she’d been keeping since childhood.

I carried that little victory to a dinner with Pat Hogan later that evening. Hogan had pulled Thelma’s and Priscilla’s credit records. Predictably, Priscilla’s demonstrated a pattern of credit abuse, while Thelma’s revealed only the information Julie had gotten on the day she strolled into our office.

“This was not unexpected,” Hogan explained, “so I took it a step further. I got Thelma’s bank and credit records.” He waved a hand, shook his head. “Don’t ask me how. I got ’em and what matters is that they show
bupkis
. You wanna go further, I got a friend who’s got a friend at IRS. For a price, Sidney, I can get a check of safe deposit boxes. At least find out if Thelma’s got one. Ditto for the daughter.”

“A lot of people have lock boxes, Pat,” I said. “What would it prove?”

“I thought about that,” he admitted. “But a hundred and fifty large takes up a lot of space. You’d have to have a very big box, much bigger than the kind families use for the jewelry and the deed on the house. Which means if the mother’s got the money, she probably took out the box recently. That would go for your client, too.”

Hogan stopped at the approach of the waiter, drained his glass while our chile was served, finally signaled for a refill before sprinkling grated monterey jack over the red beans. “That kind of money,” he said before plunging his soup spoon into the chile, “you gotta figure it’s well hidden. If it was mine, I wouldn’t put it anywhere the government might look. Not if I was figurin’ to spend six months in Rikers waiting for trial.”

Though I continued, over the next few weeks, to spend the mornings with my cocounsel, preparing witnesses, and the nights roaming the Lower East Side, the messages I gathered from those sources were decidedly mixed, the pea stubbornly elusive. Priscilla, on the other hand, if not exactly forthcoming, at least had the answers. And I’m certain she knew that I was looking for answers. Although our distinctly grounded sessions were anchored in the practical, in my charitable moments, I truly believed that Caleb and Julie had penetrated that blank facade, had gotten beneath it, reached into her heart. More likely, though, Priscilla’s need for reassurance sprang from the fact that her own life was on the line. There was simply no way she could be sure I wouldn’t betray her in the course of the trial.

Toward the end of the week following Caleb’s funeral, Priscilla directly approached the question of absolution. I remember striding into the cubicle, tossing the customary pack of smokes on the table, then launching into a monologue.

“I’ve come up with a way to deal with the fingerprint and how it got on the bullet.” I turned away from her, began to pace. The scenario I’d invented as I drove from Manhattan was slick enough to excite my lawyerly instincts. The fact that it actually created the perjury it suborned, that I’d crossed a line, interested me not at all.

“Now, if I remember correctly, you told me the gun belonged to Byron, that it was in the living room when you picked it up. I think we both realize that’s not gonna wash if you want the jury to believe that you were in immediate fear of your life when you pulled the trigger. Remember, Byron’s physical condition is in play here. He was very, very drunk. If you claim, for instance, that the bullet fell out when the cylinder popped open, that you picked it up and put it back in the chamber, the prosecution will contend that Byron didn’t attack you before you reloaded because he was physically unable to do so.”

I stopped with my back to Priscilla, traced a crack in the particle board with a fingernail in need of cutting. In the past, I’d always been fastidious and I couldn’t help but wonder, as I listened to the mope in the next cubicle lie to his attorney, what other small attachments to ordinary life I’d surrendered. “For the last week, Priscilla, we’ve been drifting away from a claim of pure self-defense.” I turned to face her. “We’ve been preparing a psychological defense. You didn’t flee because you believed that Byron would come after you, that he’d find you and kill you no matter where you went. And why not? When you tried to run away, he came to your parents’ home and took you out by force. With Dr. Howe to back you up, it’s a legitimate defense, even for a predicate felon. Or, it would be except for one indisputable fact: your husband was terminally ill. His liver was rotten and he was sick almost all the time. Even your own witnesses, Priscilla, the ones prepared to testify in your defense, tell me there were times, even days, when Byron couldn’t get out of bed.