Bad Lawyer (30 page)

W
ITH DELANEY PUSHING HARD
, we managed to work our way through the clerk who’d taken Maybelle Higginbotham’s 911 call and the dispatcher who’d sent Rodriguez and his partner to the Sweet apartment before the one o’clock recess. Because I didn’t intend to dispute the basic facts, I asked very few questions. I wanted the prosecution’s case done with as quickly as possible, so the jury could focus on the victim as a beast, instead of the victim as a victim.

I did take the first witness, Ms. Irene Gordon, back over a tape of Maybelle’s call, emphasizing the last sentence: “I think he done killed her this time.”

“Did you understand the words, ‘
he
killed
her
,’ to mean the caller believed the victim to be a woman?” I asked.

“I’ve already said that I don’t remember the call.”

“Well, did you communicate the fact that the caller believed the victim to be a woman to the dispatcher?”

“We don’t speak directly to the dispatchers. We write down the complaint and send it along a conveyer belt.”

“And do you have that written complaint, Ms. Gordon?”

“No, we don’t keep every scrap of paper.”

Gordon’s voice was edgy and suspicious. She held herself stiffly with her head pulled back and her arms folded just below her breasts. There was no reason for her attitude, because I wasn’t trying to discredit her testimony. Still, if she wanted to appear evasive and the jury concluded that she was holding something back, it was, as Grampa Itzy would say, fine by me.

“When you made up the complaint for the dispatcher, do you remember writing that
he
killed
her
?”

“I don’t remember the incident, sir.”

“Is it your practice, Ms. Gordon, to note the gender of a victim in your complaints?”

“Would you repeat that? I didn’t get the question.”

We went at it for another few minutes, with Gordon refusing to give a direct answer. I didn’t really care about the answer one way or another, but I did, according to the transcript, take the opportunity to repeat my basic ‘
he
killed
her
’ message an additional six times.

After Delaney sent the jury off to lunch, I asked to approach the bench, and Carlo followed me over. When I requested permission to have Thelma Barrow visit her daughter during the lunch recess, he tossed me a suspicious look, then said, “I assume she’d be willing to submit to a search?”

“She was searched on the way into the building,” I responded, “but if you wanna do body cavities, maybe we could use an NBC camera crew for the video.” The implication, of course, was that if Thelma was subjected to a thorough search (or, worse, refused permission to visit her daughter), the media would be informed and, through the media, the jurors.

After a few minutes of wrangling, I agreed to have Thelma’s purse reexamined before she went inside. That done, I reunited mother and daughter, then took off for a lunch meeting with Pat Hogan in a McDonald’s on Chambers Street. Hogan’s message, delivered a day earlier by Rebecca Barthelme, had been positive enough to get my senses tingling, but when I saw his face, I knew it wasn’t to be. Hogan was sitting by himself at a table near the counter, huddled over a Big Mac and looking distracted. When he saw me, he shrugged apologetically and motioned me to get some food.

Five minutes later, the proud bearer of an incredibly greasy fish sandwich and a container of scalding hot coffee, I laid my tray on the table and took a seat.

“All right, Pat, let’s hear the bad news.”

“The bad news is that there’s no news.” He shoved a french fry into his mouth, washed it down with a drink of Sprite, then he leaned across the table and tapped my wrist. “Thing was, buddy, I thought I found the money. There’s this friend of Priscilla’s, woman named Pauline Yager, got a dumpy one-roomer over a
bodega
on Grand Street. Looks like it couldn’t go for more than a few hundred a month, meanwhile the windows are alarmed.” He loosened his tie, opened the top button of his shirt. “The first thing I figured, naturally, was that she was in the drug business, but when I asked around, I was told she was clean. So, what I did, after duly considering the penalties, was arrange a visit one afternoon when she wasn’t home. The alarm system was a phony, just a bunch of magnetic strips stuck to the glass. She must have put ’em there to scare off the junkies.”

“And there was no money, either,” I said.

“Yeah,” he responded, “you might say it was a false alarm.” When I didn’t smile, he continued. “What could I do? It was a mistake, that’s all. I’m gonna keep tryin’, but I don’t have a good feeling. It looks like you’re gonna have to live with your doubts.”

If I was forced to live with my doubts, Priscilla, when I rejoined her, appeared to have no doubts at all. She and her mother were in extremely good spirits. They were talking about a trip she and her parents had taken to California many years before. I ignored the both of them, spending the last few minutes before returning to the courtroom with Janet Boroda. The afternoon’s testimony would, I was certain, wipe the smile off her face. I found myself looking forward to it.

Fifteen minutes later, Carlo put Officer Alfonso Rodriguez on the stand. An hour after that, the jury got its first look at Byron Sweet’s body. He was on his stomach, his head turned to the right, lying in a pool of dark red blood. A wide irregular swatch of blood trailed off behind him, reaching to the lip of the chair in which he’d been sitting.

I was seated behind the defense table when the photo went up. Priscilla was beside me and I watched her out of the corner of my eye. Naturally, we’d discussed this moment and her reaction to it at length, finally deciding that she should glance at the photo for a fraction of a second, then turn away.

“You’ve got to show the jury that some part of you still loves him,” I’d told her. “Despite everything that happened.”

Priscilla followed my instructions exactly, even managing to flinch as she turned her eyes downward. Then she took it one step further and began to cry. There were no sound effects, no sobbing, no sniffles. Just tears running along the side of her nose to drop onto the table. As I took out my handkerchief and passed it over, I thought of Caleb lying in that alley, wondered if Priscilla had reserved even a single tear for his passing.

“Mr. Kaplan,” Delaney asked, “does your client need a recess?”

As I turned back to face the jury, I realized that Priscilla’s tears had done their job, that every juror, including the alternates, were looking at her and not at Byron’s corpse.

“No, your Honor,” Priscilla answered before I could speak. “I’m all right.” She raised her chin, looked straight at the jury. Her normally flat gray eyes, at that moment, were so filled with sorrow as to appear actually wise.

When Carlo ended the pantomime by slapping his pointer against Byron’s photo, Priscilla’s gaze turned down to her folded hands. In recognition, perhaps, of the fact that her scene had been completed. A few minutes after that, photos of Byron’s corpse, taken from several angles, were circulating through the jury box. The eyes of the jurors moved from the photos in their hands to Priscilla, a typical progression. As victim photos go, this group was fairly benign. Still, I was certain that most of the jurors were staring at that pool of blood and thinking that somebody would have to pay.

There was nothing I could do about it beyond feigning indifference while Carlo pinned the photos up on a board, then turned to Rodriguez who told the same basic story he’d told to the Grand Jury, then repeated at the preliminary hearing. As cop witnesses go, he was strong and believable, his youth a definite asset. But, again, since I wasn’t disputing his testimony, I was able to use his credibility to Priscilla’s advantage.

“How many times did you knock on the door,” I asked, “before someone responded?”

“Once.”

“And was Priscilla Sweet the individual who responded?”

“Yes.”

Rodriguez, having heard these questions before, was answering quickly, though I don’t believe he knew where I was going.

“And did she call to you through the door?”

“No, she opened the door.”

“And did you then explain why you were there and request permission to enter?”

“Yes.”

“And did Priscilla Sweet ask to see a search warrant?”

“No.”

“And did she refuse permission to allow you to enter?”

“No.”

“If she had refused permission, Officer Rodriguez, tell the court what you would have done?”

Carlo, the first on the prosecutorial team to awaken, objected. “Calls for a conclusion, your Honor.”

“Overruled. You may answer.”

“Would you repeat the question?” Rodriguez’s voice had dropped a full octave. He was now suspicious.

“If she’d told you to take a hike, Officer, what would you have done?”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know whether you would have retreated or forced your way inside?”

“I don’t know.”

“Officer Rodriguez, you’ve already testified that you have an independent recollection of that evening. Is that correct?”

“Yes.”

“And now you’re telling this court that you never gave a thought to what you were going to do if you were refused entry to that apartment?”

“I might have thought about it. I just don’t remember.”

Rodriguez’s features tightened down to match his voice, turning his boyish good looks childishly sullen. Carlo tried to protect him by claiming I was badgering the witness and Delaney, though he overruled the objection, told me I was walking very close to the edge. I apologized, then went back to work.

“Officer Rodriguez, the 911 call was logged in at 5:52
P.M.
Would you tell us what time it was when you knocked on the door of the Sweet apartment?”

“Approximately 6:20.”

“And then you went inside and observed a body on the floor and a gun on the table?”

“That’s right.”

“And the gun was lying in plain view? No attempt had been made to conceal it?”

“Not that I could see.”

“And had any attempt been made to move or conceal the body in the twenty-eight minutes between the time the 911 call was made and the time you arrived on the scene?”

Carlo objected again, stating that Rodriguez hadn’t acted as an investigator and was not competent to render a judgment. Delaney, as expected, sustained the objection.

“Officer Rodriguez,” I said after a moment, “when you entered the Sweet apartment twenty-eight minutes after the 911 call was received, did you find Byron Sweet lying in the center of the living room and not behind the couch?”

Carlo was on his feet before I finished the question, but this time Delaney overruled. “Make your point and move on, Mr. Kaplan,” he said.

“He was lying very close to the center of the living room.”

“And had any attempt been made to conceal his body?”

“No, he was lying where he crawled after she shot him.”

Score one for the cops. I finished my cross-examination by having Rodriguez describe Priscilla’s physical condition. To my surprise, instead of resisting he turned poetic, comparing a bruise on Priscilla’s face to the skin of a green plum.

O
N THE FOLLOWING MORNING
, I woke chasing a dream in which Julie’s voice rolled through my consciousness like oil beneath the fingers of a masseur. I was certain Julie’s message was of great importance, something I very much needed to know, but I just couldn’t catch up and her voice was gradually replaced by the soft drumming of raindrops against the window. I left the bed and crossed the room. According to the clock, the sun was already up, but the northern view from the window was of an angry, dark sky. Below me, a dense fog shimmered beneath the amber streetlights in Union Square Park. It hung just above the floodlit tower on the Metropolitan Life building ten blocks to the north, completely obscured the Empire State Building on 34th Street.

I walked away from the window and over to the coffee machine on the filing cabinet. Without thinking, I began to spoon fresh coffee into a clean filter. I was in the process of adding tap water, when a single fact, one I already knew, but had failed to act on, jumped into my consciousness. It was Thelma Barrow, not Priscilla, who’d led Guzman to my door. In order to convict Priscilla, I would have to build a case for a pre-planned conspiracy between Priscilla and her mother, a conspiracy that began when Thelma falsely reported her daughter’s kidnapping, then continued up through the actual murder to the day Thelma told Guzman that I was holding his money.

According to that line of thought, Priscilla had left the cocaine in order to make the first lie she’d told Guzman, that the cops had stolen most of the coke, more believable. I was pure backup, a second line of defense in the event Guzman rejected the first.

I marched into my office and dialed Pat Hogan’s home number. He picked up on the seventh ring, his raspy whisper revealing his compromised condition. “Ohhhhhh, shit,” he moaned. “Who the fuck is this?”

“Nobody important, Pat. Just your client.”

“Sid?” His voice oozed disbelief. “You oughta know better. It’s goddamned 6:22 in the morning.”

I started to say that, being as I was already into him for ten grand with more to come, I’d call him whenever I felt like it, then stopped myself.

“Okay, I hear ya, Pat, but I’ve made a decision and we don’t have a lot of time. I wanted to be sure I got to speak to you before I left for court.”

He moaned softly, drew a deep breath. “I think my brain is leaking into the telephone.”

“Actually, I’m sucking it out from this end.” I smacked my lips.

“Awright, awright, I’m movin’.” The bedsprings groaned in the background. I heard footsteps cross a room, the sound of water running, the squeak of a closing faucet. A moment later Hogan was back on the phone. “Let’s do it, Sid,” he said. “Before my eyeballs fall out.”

“What I wanna do is concentrate on Thelma Barrow. If Priscilla was running a scam, Thelma was part of it from the beginning.” I went on to describe the fracas in the Barrow kitchen when Byron allegedly kidnapped Priscilla, and the fact that Gennaro Cassadina didn’t remember it, though he could describe the gun Joe Barrow kept. “I thought you might start by checking on Joe Barrow, maybe with the shopkeepers near his hardware store. See if he’s the gentle soul his wife makes him out to be.”