A Trial by Jury (6 page)

At this point the defense counsel went for the kill, raising his voice and asserting that all of Hector-Laverne's testimony had clearly been a vendetta, contrived to avenge his deceased friend, and that he had never, in fact, seen Monte Milcray before: Would Mr. or Miss Hebreo, “Laverne,” Hector, now please acknowledge for the court that he (or she) had lied under oath?

Flustered but defiant, Hector-Laverne raised his voice back, trying to explain. The defense cut him off, insisting on a yes or a no. He began again, again was cut off, and into the rising voices came an objection from the prosecution. The judge silenced the tumult and addressed both the defense counsel and the witness in turn: counsel would please control his tone; turning to Hector-Laverne, the judge explained that he would have to answer the question.

There is an academic discipline, Queer Theory, that takes people like Hector-Laverne Hebreo and their milieu as a subject for sustained scholarly analysis. One might be skeptical.
The People
v.
Monte Milcray
cured me of such skepticism. When
Paris Is Burning
comes to the grave forum of a murder trial, the result is chewy and puzzling. The campiness takes on unexpected power, forcing surprising juxtapositions and genuinely subversive moments, all the things that the denizens of cultural-studies departments promise. This went beyond how funny the sergeant-at-arms looked graciously helping Nahteesha (in precarious stilettos) down from the witness box. Take, for instance, this moment in Hector-Laverne's testimony. On the proverbial ropes, Hector-Laverne Hebreo did not answer yes or no. Instead, he wheeled around to the judge—a dry and disagreeable man—and, furiously pumping a crossed leg, announced like a Southern belle catcalled in a roadhouse, “Judge, I am NOT gonna sit here and let him make a
clown
of me, and I am NOT gonna let him
yell
at me!”—an exclamation so fantastically heartfelt and queeny and downright weird that those who weren't slack-jawed in the court looked as if they were sucking a fistful of Sweetarts.

But even stranger was the judge's response. A sour bone, a humbug autocrat, the judge paused for a moment. A wry smile passed across his beadle lips.

“I,” he said soothingly, and with more than a trace of gallantry, “I am not going to
let
him yell at you.”

This was the judge who had browbeaten everyone who had spoken to him throughout the trial, who had been magnificently impolite at every opportunity. But Hector-Laverne managed to pull off a completely unexpected (and seditious) tweak, teasing this berobed codger into a bizarre transgression of heterosexual norms: the judge had become, for a moment, Hector-Laverne's white knight and protector. Disciplines have been founded on less juicy moments.

For all its drama, later witnesses further undermined Hector-Laverne's testimony. The bartender at the Watutsi, for instance, readily acknowledged being friendly with Hector-Laverne and Nahteesha, but denied ever having seen the defendant, much less having thrown him out of the bar.

Stevie Trevor—tall and gentle-seeming, wearing a red sweatshirt embroidered with a large cartoon character (Wile E. Coyote)—told a story difficult to reconcile with that of Hector-Laverne and Nahteesha, with whom he was not close. He had left New York and moved to Jacksonville, Florida, after the killing, and expressed little enthusiasm for returning to the events of that evening. Gangly, somewhat childlike (if also affecting a boyishness), he seemed bashfully reluctant to offer his blue-movie narrative. Some of this was surely the anxiety of a young man with both hearing and speech difficulties in facing the public spectacle of a trial: his lilting voice resonated with the multiple harmonics of those who cannot hear their own words.

“Stevie, did you go to the Watutsi Lounge on the evening of August first?” the assistant prosecutor began, loudly and with exaggerated enunciation.

“Yes, I did,” he replied, his large, open hand grazing the side of his head, the fingers arched back, as if to push his ear toward the questioner.

“And did you see Randolph Cuffee, ‘Antigua,' there that night?”

“Yes.”

“And did you talk with him?”

“Yes.” He drew the word out like a tone to be sung.

“And did he ask you to do something?”

Stevie smiled coyly. “Yes, he
did,
” came the answer, with a hint of scandal.

What Antigua allegedly asked Stevie to do was to turn a trick, back at Antigua's apartment. As it happened, Randolph Cuffee ran a small gay escort service on the side, and at times drew on his circle of acquaintances at the Watutsi to procure partners for men who solicited his services. This was not the first time that he had called on Stevie Trevor in such capacity; Stevie had been in and out of foster care for most of his youth and was no stranger to living rough downtown.

Trevor accepted the assignation, and later that night walked the two blocks to the familiar apartment, where he found Cuffee, the customer (a white man with a shaved head), and a young black man, who was seated on the couch. Asked if he now saw that black man in the court, Trevor nodded; asked to identify him, Trevor looked pointedly to his left, raised his right hand in the opposite direction, and let a tsk-tsking index finger fall on the defendant, to his far right. It was an odd moment, as if Stevie were telling the teacher on Milcray.

Stevie Trevor claimed never to have seen the man on the couch before, nor had he ever met the john. Accompanying the latter to the bathroom at the rear of the apartment, Stevie began to undress while the customer inhaled an intoxicating “popper” and stripped. Asked by the prosecutor what he understood was about to happen, Stevie replied that he expected the white man to perform oral sex on him, and then, he thought, the white man, more likely than not, would wish to be penetrated. To these ends Stevie manipulated himself in order to achieve an erection (“ejaculated myself,” as he put it) and put on two condoms, provided by his client.

As he did so, however, the white man took out and charged a small glass crack pipe (later recovered at the scene) and began to smoke, offering it to Trevor. He declined, and reportedly became angry, saying that he did not meddle with crack. Disgusted by the incivility of the customer and the “arrogant” (i.e., nasty, offensive) smell of toasted cocaine now pervading the small bathroom, Trevor testified that he removed the condoms (here he gestured in such a way as to suggest that he did so by pinching them at the base with his thumb and forefinger and shucking them defiantly), and exited into the main room of the apartment, from which, after briefly explaining things to Cuffee, he took his leave.

This testimony placed the victim in a new light. Nahteesha and Hector-Laverne both vehemently denied that Cuffee ever pimped his acquaintances or ran an escort service, but the prosecution did not contest the evidence that he did—including business records found on the victim's home computer. Trevor's testimony, however, also threw a number of uncertainties into the case. The most obvious of these was the presence in the fatal apartment of a sex-starved, shaved-headed white male, high on crack, who was about to confront his pimp, and who never turned up in subsequent investigations. One did not need a hyperactive imagination to paint a considerable number of scenarios for how this volatile encounter (mediated, somehow, by Milcray?) might have been linked to Cuffee's violent death minutes later. The whole business also made more spooky Milcray's fleeting allusion, in the videotaped statement, to his having thought he heard the victim, as he slumped into the corner, mumble something about there being someone else in the apartment.

Was the john still in the bathroom during the alleged attempted rape? Did he, perhaps, duck out after Milcray had fled? If so, perhaps he could account for one of the lingering minor puzzles of the case: Milcray insisted that the television had been on when he exited (in fact, that it had provided the only light for the whole incident), but the police testified that they found the television off when they burst into the room the following afternoon. Leaving the bathroom, seeing the body and the partially open curtain, and surmising that the light from the television would reveal the corpse to anyone who peeked in the window, did the john turn the television off in order to give himself more time to get away from the scene he had stumbled on? And did he merely stumble on that scene, or was he involved in it in some other way?

Milcray, of course, had claimed simply that he did the stabbing alone, in self-defense. But, then again, he had clearly lied before.

Baroque plots percolated in the mind as Stevie Trevor stepped out of the box, willowy and tall, and made his way from the room. Later, in deliberations, I would realize that others, too, found themselves fascinated by the possibility of ever more tangled stories—conspiracies, missing persons, Milcray taking the fall to protect, say, one of these witnesses we had just heard. Who knew? Now, as I look back, some of the hypotheticals we entertained (however briefly) have about them a feverish and fantastical quality. Such are the perils of the imagination in a trial: the sense of drama goads one to raise the dramatic ante; to conceive of fantastic resolutions worthy of the setting, the cast, the deeds. But not only that. This sort of reasoning—compounding improbabilities, dreaming up still more intricate motivations and counterplots—has, I think, much to do with a deep, shared idea about the nature of truth and the means of reaching it: namely, a sense that getting to the bottom of things should be hard work, should be difficult, should lead through long and knotty webs. Philosophers may wield Ockham's cold razor in the pursuit of the true (cut out everything but the necessary), using it to slice the tangled bits of life to the floor, but most of us would rather set to work with another sort of epistemological tool, more labor-intensive, more creative, better able to work with those tangles. Ockham's knitting needles?

This is not necessarily bad. After all, the truth
is
usually hard-won, complicated, and time-intensive; or, at least, there are as many truths like this as there are simple ones. Once let loose in a jury, however, such a worthy veridical work ethic can lead to the collective construction of giant follies. Everyone wants to do all the work, resist anything that looks too easy. More than one case, I suspect, has been resolved—to the general perplexity of lawyers, judges, and observers—by the operation of this earnest principle in the jury room: take the long route to reach the truth; no shortcuts, no matter how obvious they seem.

For instance, what was I doing dreaming up scenarios based on evidence as slippery as a killer's elliptical recollection of his victim's last, gasping words? Surely this was thought setting off down a long and twisty route indeed, and probably a dead end.

Still, if, as he lost consciousness, Cuffee did in fact mumble something about the presence of someone else in the apartment, there was another person he might have meant. Matthew Pessel was a sharp-featured young man with curly hair and a nervous demeanor. He looked about thirty and had the warm brown complexion of an East Indian. On the stand he wore a loud, double-breasted acid-green suit and a solid shirt in taupe. He brushed his nose as he spoke. It had been he who escorted the police to the apartment on the afternoon of August 2. Though he denied having been at the apartment during the stabbing, he acknowledged that he had been there right before and right after; and he had intended to spend the night.

Pessel claimed to have made the victim's acquaintance several years earlier, at a restaurant in the Village, and explained that they had become friends. The younger man periodically stayed over at Cuffee's apartment, so convenient to the nightlife downtown. Pessel himself lived in Brooklyn with his fiancée. On the night in question, Pessel, who at the time worked in a midtown bank (he now claimed to “run my own Internet company”), had been forced to seek alternate accommodations because his fiancée's mother had shown up unexpectedly. He called Cuffee, who told him to feel free to crash. After watching a movie with his fiancée and her mother, Pessel testified, he called a car service, confirmed his imminent arrival with Cuffee by phone, and packed a hanging bag. He arrived at 103 Corlears after 11 p.m., where, he claimed, he found Cuffee in a somewhat excited state, explaining that he had a “date”; Pessel could change (he was still in a suit) and leave his bag, but then would need to clear out for a while. Pessel agreed, and testified that he went around the corner to a bar, where he had a beer and waited for more than an hour. At that point he called, got Cuffee's machine, and waited some more. After several more attempts, growing increasingly tired and frustrated, Pessel wandered back to the apartment (it was now after one), where he found the lights out and no one answering the bell. He waited on the stoop for some time, noticed a small puddle of blood there, waited some more, then finally departed, spending the night in his office.

When he had not heard from Cuffee by midmorning the following day, Pessel contacted the police, explaining that he was concerned and that he also had property he needed to recover from the apartment (his hanging bag). He met two officers at the Sixth Precinct that afternoon and escorted them to 103 Corlears, where the super had dutifully cleaned up the pool of blood. A trail of overlooked drips, however, led from the street to the body. Pessel was not permitted to remove his bag when police first examined the scene (or even to enter the room). He recovered it later, at which point he had several moments in the apartment.

The significance of this lay in what he might have done during those moments.

Pessel offered the prosecution very useful testimony on the troubling matter of the wig. This object amounted to good supporting evidence for Milcray's story of the drag seduction. But Pessel testified that he had seen the wig in the apartment on several earlier occasions, and that it was never worn—always simply shoved into a corner on the floor, the relic of some forgotten gag (indeed, the wig looked more like a dirty mop than a seductive hairdo when it was introduced to the court—matted and tangled with bits of rubbish).