Authors: Stephen Solomita
Carlo, needless to say, demurred, and a few minutes later, Delaney having pronounced Goldbaum’s clinical experience expert enough for the jury to consider, the trial was again under way. As for myself, I went back to my ruminations, gradually becoming more and more self-absorbed until a burst of laughter snatched me back to the present.
Humorous moments are rare in the courtroom, especially when a jury is present, a fact which makes them, when they do occur, all the more memorable. Goldbaum, when asked if he’d ever encountered a belligerent drunk with a blood-alcohol level above .4, responded by pointing to a scar on his head, then explaining that he’d received it from a bedpan-wielding drunk with a level of .48.
Barely able to repress a smirk, Delaney popped his gavel once, then again, as several jurors, including Latisha Garret, continued to chuckle. A moment later, Rebecca turned Goldbaum over to Carlo who worked the other side of the question for the better part of an hour, forcing Goldbaum to admit that extremely high levels of inebriation often produce a loss of consciousness and sometimes a loss of life. Goldbaum, though he’d never before testified in a trial, came up with the proper response. “Sometimes,” he told Buscetta, “isn’t always. If you want to know the condition of a specific individual, you have to ask someone who was there to observe that individual.”
Delaney recessed for the weekend before Goldbaum was out of the courtroom. I expect he could already smell the Chivas, already feel his butt against the seat of his favorite bar stool. I watched him leave, watched two court officers lead Priscilla back to the pens, then went out to corner Thelma Barrow in the hallway.
“I want you to come into the office after court on Monday afternoon,” I told her. “To go over your testimony one more time.” I put my hand on her shoulder, looked into her eyes. “You’re the keystone, Thelma, and you’ve got to get it right.”
“I thought I was going to testify on Monday?” Her palms were pressed together and she was working them in a slow circle.
“Buscetta’s decided to slow the pace down. We’ll be lucky to get through the trial by Memorial Day.”
As if summoned, Rebecca chose that moment to approach. She had her coat slung over the shoulder and appeared supremely confident. “Looks like Carlo doesn’t have any pressing engagements,” she announced. “We’ll be lucky to get a verdict by the Fourth of July.”
“I was telling Thelma I want her to come into the office on Monday evening,” I said. “To go over her testimony one more time.”
Rebecca cocked her head, looked hard into my eyes. Thelma’s testimony was her responsibility, not mine, and she didn’t like being reminded of her second-chair status. “Yeah,” she said after a long moment, “that might not be a bad idea.”
“We could order in some dinner. Make it a party.” I finally took my hand off Thelma’s shoulder. “And by the way, Rebecca,” I announced, “you were great today.”
O
VER THE WEEKEND, I
became my great-grandfather, Hyman Baruch. I wandered the galleries of the Metropolitan, the Whitney, the Jewish Museum, the Museum of the City of New York, and the National Museum of the American Indian. I sat through two utterly boring (and utterly obscure) black-and-white films at a Peter Lorre retrospective in a packed Greenwich Village theater.
I remember almost nothing of what I saw, not surprising because my trek had little to do with nature or culture or even entertainment. No, my goal was only to outrun a fear that continued to build despite my efforts, a fear that had, if not a name, at least a message that winked on and off like a prompt on a computer screen: What, my fear asked me, are you going to do about it?
I carried that fear into Judge Delaney’s courtroom on Monday morning, sat with it as Rebecca Barthelme put Amelia Green and Lance McCormack, the waitress and bartender at Pentangles the night Priscilla was attacked, and Margaret D’Cassio, Priscilla’s college chum, through their paces.
For the first time, the jury was presented with irrefutable evidence of Byron’s violence and they reacted appropriately. When Lance McCormack declared, “I was really scared, but I knew he was going to kill her if I didn’t pull him off,” Latisha Garret’s fists clenched in her lap and Rafael Fuentes, who’d been scribbling furiously, capped his pen, then wiped the corner of his eye with a wrinkled handkerchief. When the photos taken at Bellevue Hospital were passed around, the jurors’ eyes went from Priscilla’s image to the living Priscilla as if seeing her for the first time.
Carlo objected at every turn, asked nitpicking questions, challenged the admissibility of nearly every piece of evidence. His strategy not only reeked of desperation, it was poorly chosen. He should have let this testimony rush by, should have gotten Priscilla on the stand as soon as possible. After all, she was his only hope. If she failed to hold up on cross-examination, if she broke, he could still win. By delaying, he not only made it harder for himself, he made it harder for me, as well. It was becoming more and more obvious that the state would not exact punishment, not for Byron or Caleb or Julie.
Despite everything, I was very good that evening. With Rebecca, Thelma, and Janet Boroda for an audience, I delivered anecdotes about clients and judges, defense attorneys and prosecutors, ordered in prime rib dinners from the Chelsea Steak House, analyzed the course—future, past, and present—of Priscilla Sweet’s trial.
Over dinner, I told a long story about the first time I’d practiced before an abusive judge; over coffee, a shorter story about a client who shot off his mouth to every reporter in New York. Thelma endured it all. She said little, sat with her back and shoulders hunched, as if fending off a cold rain. When I finally let her go, at seven-thirty, she rose, slipped into her coat, pulled a knit beret down to her ears, and was out the door without changing expression. Janet and Rebecca followed almost immediately.
I crossed the room to a window, watched my paralegal and my co-counsel exit the building, then hail a northbound cab on Broadway. Suddenly, I realized that I didn’t know where either lived, if they were heading for an uptown co-op, or to Grand Central for a train ride to Connecticut. Maybe they’d told me at some point, but their lives had so little interested me that I’d simply forgotten. Or maybe I’d never asked.
As if determined to rescue me from my thoughts, another of those I’d used, Pat Hogan, stepped from the doorway of a small coffee shop and crossed Broadway. Despite his bulk and the large brown suitcase he held in his gloved hand, Hogan moved very quickly, very lightly, with a freaky grace that instantly reminded me of Caleb’s.
A minute later, as I stood by the open door, I heard the decrepit motor that drove our elevator start up with an angry screech, then quickly settle into an uneven rumble as the elevator began to move. The elevator took its time, crashing, as usual, into the steel frame that caged it between the second and third floors, then again between the fourth and fifth. Finally it stopped to disgorge a wildly grinning Pat Hogan. “Buck, buck, buck,” he said as he walked past me into the office.
“Buck what?” I closed the door and followed him inside.
“I was imitating a chicken.” He dropped the suitcase on my desk, flicked both clasps at the same time, jerked up the lid to reveal stacks of neatly banded greenbacks. “You know, as in the chickens are coming home to roost.”
For a moment, I said nothing, my eyes riveted to the money. Then I recalled an obscure bit of testimony from some long forgotten trial. The witness, a Treasury agent, had announced, with a proud flourish, that 450 bills of any denomination weigh exactly one pound.
“They’re all hundreds?” I asked, knowing full well that wholesale drug dealers (the problems of counting, storage, and transportation obvious enough) commonly refuse to accept any bill lower than a fifty.
Hogan snorted, said, “No. There’s stacks of fifties on the bottom.”
“But nothing smaller?”
This time he didn’t bother to respond. “I found the case in the basement, Sid, in an old cabinet stuck behind a bureau stored behind the furnace.” His face was flushed; his scalp glistened with sweat. “Wanna hear a good joke? When I came through the basement window an alarm went off.” He chuckled manfully. “Thelma had motion detectors all over the basement. Might as well have put up a sign: End Of Rainbow/Dig Here.”
“What’d you do?”
He grabbed a handful of cash, held it in front of my nose as if offering a bouquet of flowers. “What does it look like I did?”
“I mean when the alarm went off?”
“That’s a joke, right?” He shook his head. “Hey, Sid, I already knew the cops wouldn’t respond, remember? So I just turned the motion detectors to face the wall and went about my business. The system recycled a few minutes later and the alarm shut down.”
I circled the desk, sat in my swivel chair, feeling like I deserved a rest I wasn’t going to get. “How much, Pat?” I asked. “How much?”
“You think I counted it?”
“Yeah, I do.”
He grinned happily and I suddenly realized that he wasn’t drunk, that for the time being the money was enough. “Well,” he said, “you’re right. Being as I was out of there in fifteen minutes, I had a little time to kill.”
“So, how much?”
“A mere pittance, Sid. Three hundred and twenty-five thousand. Give or take a few bundles.”
“She could have saved Caleb and Julie. She could have saved Caleb and Julie and still had a hundred and seventy-five thousand left over.”
Hogan began to slap bundles of hundred dollar bills down on my desk. “You’re lookin’ at it the wrong way, counselor. Caleb and Julie weren’t the ones who got threatened. Uh-uh. Way I remember it, the bad guys were after Sid Kaplan. It was you she didn’t wanna save.”
“I don’t want that money,” I told him, though I made no move to put it back in the suitcase.
“Throw it away, burn it, donate it to AIDS research. I don’t give a shit.” He stopped abruptly, closed and locked the case. “Fifteen percent, my little co-conspirator. Sixty thousand for the man who hired me to get the answers.” He jerked the suitcase off the desk, held it against his chest with both hands for a moment, finally let it drop to his side. “Well, I’m off, Sid. I’m off to Las Vegas, see if I can drink myself to death like Nicholas Cage in that movie. You need me, I’ll be the fat guy with the drop-dead call girl at the hundred-dollar blackjack table.”
I wanted to maintain a silence, let him walk off into the sunset, but I lacked the courage. “Wait a minute, Pat. Before you go, I have a question. How do we know the money belongs to Priscilla? How do we know it doesn’t belong to Thelma?” Again, I tried to stop myself, again I failed. “Guzman told me that Priscilla owed him a hundred and fifty thousand. That’s a lot less than you’ve got in that suitcase.”
Hogan crossed the room before turning to face me again. His knuckles, wrapped around the handle of the suitcase, were bone white. “You wanna answer those questions, put ’em to your client. You want a real question, ask yourself what you’re gonna do about it when she tells you she paid for that money in blood.”
W
HEN I SAW THE
huddled silhouettes of Priscilla Sweet and Thelma Barrow on the following morning, I was instantly reminded of a client I’d represented many years before on the afternoon Judge David Guttman sentenced him to three consecutive twenty-five year terms in prison. His name was Abel Code and somehow, despite an extensive history of violent crime, he’d expected the judge to show him mercy, had told me, in the few minutes we had together before his sentencing, “I’m a white man, Sid. Even a Jew wouldn’t treat a white man like a nigger.”
As Guttman passed out years like Christmas candy, the blood had drained from Abel Code’s face, leaving his skin the uniform dingy gray of prison underwear. Priscilla’s skin, despite the face powder, the hint of blush on her cheeks, was the same dingy gray when I entered the little courtroom at a quarter to nine. Thelma’s skin, by contrast, was the color of alabaster; her blue eyes looked as if they’d been painted over china.
“You seem nervous today, Thelma,” I said as I tossed my coat onto a bench. “I hope you’re not worried about your testimony. Like I already told you, not even Carlo Buscetta would be stupid enough to browbeat the loving mom.”
“It’s not that, Sid,” Priscilla answered for her mother as I took a seat directly behind them. “My mother was burglarized last night.” Her green eyes pushed into mine, as if opening the door of a closet.
In the hours following Hogan’s departure, I’d attempted to devise a plan of action, but I still wasn’t sure, at that point, if there was anything I could do to effect the outcome of the trial short of screaming, “She did it,” to the jurors. (Which would result, not in a guilty verdict, but in a mistrial and probable disbarment.) Even if I blew my final argument, even if I asked Priscilla, on direct examination, the sort of questions Carlo would eventually ask anyway, as long as Priscilla kept her cool, we would probably win.
“I hope you didn’t lose anything valuable,” I said to Thelma. Then, before she could respond, I again turned to my client, “I think I’ll come out to Rikers this evening. To go over your testimony. You’ll be on the stand first thing tomorrow morning.”
“Like you went over my mother’s testimony yesterday?”
“Exactly, Priscilla.” I stood up, stretched, said, “If I don’t get a cup of coffee, I’m gonna fall asleep in the courtroom. I’ll see you guys in a few.”
Rebecca put on four witnesses that day, beginning with Dr. Theodore Grace, the physician who’d treated Priscilla at Bellevue after the Pentangles incident. Though Grace claimed to have no independent memory of Priscilla Sweet (and, indeed, had only come to testify upon receiving a subpoena), he identified his signature on the hospital records, then compared those records to the photographs taken by Miriam Farber, finally pronouncing the injuries visible on the photos consistent with his own painstaking documentation.
An extremely agitated Thelma Barrow followed. Thelma sat with her legs pressed together, her palms turning slow circles on the tops of her thighs, her back rigid. She delivered her testimony in a monotone that must have driven Rebecca Barthelme to distraction. Whenever Rebecca tried to lead her witness, Carlo objected and was sustained, turning what should have been a naturally told horror story into a series of terse responses to a single, repeated question: “And what happened next, Mrs. Barrow?”