Bad Lawyer (37 page)

I still saw nothing in her eyes, no glimmer of emotion, no hint of guile, nothing at all. “Does that mean you want your money back?” I laughed loud enough to attract the attention of the corrections officer in the hallway. “Hey, I’m a bastard; you’re a bastard. You stole from Byron; I stole from you. You paid in blood; I paid in blood. I’ve got the money; you
don’t
.” I stopped abruptly, waited until I was sure she had no answer. “Look at the bright side, Priscilla. If I’d been charging by the hour, as I would have been if you hadn’t feigned indigence, you’d have spent most of the money by now anyway. Spent it well, I might add, on a perfect defense.”

She let me in, then, just for a moment, flashed me a look of such hatred that I flinched involuntarily. My fear, momentary though it was, seemed to calm her. She leaned back in her chair, looked around as if remembering where she was. Finally, she turned back to me, said, “I’m willing to cut you in, Sid. As long as you make it reasonable. Otherwise, you and Byron can say hello to each other in hell.”

“Really? You might keep in mind that you’ll be charged with first degree murder this time. In case a sentence of life without the possibility of parole means something to you. Or do you expect to get away with this one, too?” I glanced at my watch. “Well, it’s growing late and I don’t want to keep you from a good night’s sleep. You testify tomorrow and jurors like their mutts alert and healthy.” I stood up, pushed my chair against the table. “As for the money … well, Priscilla, there’s always Tucker Trucking. They really love you down there.”

P
RISCILLA WAS PERFECT. PRISCILLA
was perfect. Priscilla was perfect.

I can no longer think of Priscilla Sweet’s performance on the day she testified without that sentence preceding all further considerations. And not only in front of the jury, but earlier, at eight-thirty when I arrived, shook the rain off my trench coat, and sat down next to her. Looking back, I believe I can understand her strategy. An incarcerated woman with few resources and fewer friends, she was simply playing the cards in her hand, all the while assuming there’d eventually be a reshuffle, another deal.

“Where’s your mother?” I asked.

“My mother’s very upset.” She stared at the backs of her hands, at her freshly manicured fingernails. “One of the C.O.’s did them for me,” she announced. “What do you think? Butch enough for the jury?” She went on before I could answer. “I didn’t want to come to court looking like an uptown princess, but I didn’t want to look ratty either.”

Her nails had been cut just beyond the tips of her fingers, coated with clear polish, the cuticles trimmed back. “Perfect,” I told her. “They’re perfect.”

She dropped her hands to her lap, drew in her shoulders. “My mother’s not coming to court today. She’s too upset.”

“Maybe,” I suggested, “your mother doesn’t love you anymore. Now that you’re broke.”

She turned to look into my eyes. “Aren’t we past the words? The taunts? I thought we were past that.”

It had been raining hard when I made my way into the building a few moments earlier, the clatter of the rain overpowering even the relentless push of the buses and trucks along Centre Street. But in that small, windowless courtroom the only sound besides our hushed voices was the scrape of Priscilla’s shoe on the tile floor. She was running the ball of her foot in a slow, steady circle. “I’ve been thinking about what you told me last night,” she continued after a long hesitation. “About the quality of the defense you’re providing. And what I think is that a hundred thousand ought to cover it.” She smiled, tapped me on the knee. “As long as I get off.”

I turned away from her, looked over at the door leading to the pens. With no hearings scheduled for the little courtroom we occupied and Delaney’s courtroom on the far side, the pens would be empty. I imagined Priscilla as she’d come up on the elevator, as she approached the bars, working over her deal. Should she offer me seventy-five? A hundred? Or should she go all the way, make that offer I couldn’t refuse? Come with it right out of the box.

“Try two-fifty,” I said. “Start at two-fifty and let’s see what happens.”

Priscilla responded without skipping a beat. “It’s been a great defense so far,” she said, “but not an expensive defense. No Dream Team. No army of experts. There was just you, Sid, which I guess makes it all the more amazing, but still …”

“What about the blood money?” I leaned toward her, pressed my shoulder against hers. “Caleb and Julie, they ought to be worth something, no?”

She looked down at her folded hands as if contemplating the problem, drawing her dark hair forward in the process to veil the side of her face. Priscilla was wearing her courtroom best, a pleated navy skirt, a white blouse that looked to be woven of silk, but was probably synthetic, a green cardigan sweater, long sleeved and demure. A small gold earring, a sea shell, glistened in her ear, echoing the glitter of a matching pin on her sweater.

“It’s not like they can be compensated,” she finally said.

“That, as you already know, Priscilla, is not the point.”

“A hundred and fifty, Sid. You have to be reasonable here.”

“Why? Why do I have to be reasonable?” The word itself—reasonable—seemed to me so absurd that I came close to laughing in Priscilla’s face. “What does reason have to do with it? Don’t forget, I’m the one with the cash.” When she didn’t respond immediately, I said, “Hey, look at the bright side. I could always throw you to the wolves, let you rot in prison while I spend your money.”

She shook her head, dismissed the possibility, said, “I feel better. Now that I don’t have to lie to you anymore.”

The door opened at that moment, opened with a painful creak, and Thelma Barrow, followed by Janet Boroda, stepped through. Priscilla was on her feet before I could react, stretching one arm toward her mother.

“I had to come,” Thelma said. “It wouldn’t look right if I didn’t come.”

As Thelma unbuttoned a clear plastic raincoat, slid it over her shoulders, a drop of water fell from the brim of her hat to the corner of her mouth. In an instant, her tongue, a pink blur, snaked out to capture the drop and pull it inside. I looked at Priscilla, looked directly into her eyes. The emotion I saw there was powerful enough to shock me. She really did love her mother, a factor which changed the basic equation not a whit. “Don’t worry, Sid,” she told me. “I know we’ll be able to work this out. We don’t have to be enemies.”

When Priscilla spoke of college as an adventure, the excitement of her first freedom, finally her head-over-heels love for Byron Sweet, her gray eyes, wistful at first, became deeply regretful. The single tear she erased with an impatient swipe of her hand was far more powerful (and far more effective) than a flood. I remember stealing a glance at Albert Wong, follower of the gentle Jesus, watching his head bob, his eyes fill, and realizing that the poor jerk had already passed through reasonable doubt, that he was standing with both feet firmly planted on exoneration.

Latisha Garret’s eyes clouded with rage as Priscilla (careful to make the important point that she’d only begun to use cocaine in response to Byron’s fists) narrated the Sweet family’s slide into drugs and violence. As Priscilla spoke, her breathing tightened down. She narrowed her shoulders, drew her breasts together, rubbed her left shoulder with her right hand. The look in her eyes shifted from regret to anger to unfathomable sorrow as she finally described the Pentangles assault. “I thought he was going to kill me,” she declared. “I thought I was going to die.”

Just in case the jury didn’t believe her, I resurrected the photos taken immediately after the Pentangles incident and again passed them around. I remember Rafael Fuentes sliding a fountain pen into his shirt pocket, carefully folding his notebook, staring down at each photo. He seemed disbelieving, the implied chaos an affront.

“When I was finally arrested for possession of cocaine,” Priscilla declared two hours into her testimony, “I think I was relieved.” Up until then, she’d only stolen occasional glances at the jury. Now, she looked directly at the jurors for the first time. “I was a drug addict,” she said. “I was addicted to cocaine. I could see that it had to end this way, that I couldn’t get clean on my own.”

And prison had done its job, at least in regard to drugs, because she hadn’t, she told them, gone back to cocaine, had resisted temptation despite all that followed, despite the kilos of white powder moving through her apartment.

“Priscilla,” I asked just before Delaney called a fifteen minute recess, “were you asked to take a blood test to determine if there were drugs present in your body after your arrest early this year?”

“Yes, I was.”

“And did you take that test voluntarily?”

“I did.”

“And do you know the results of that test?”

“Yes.”

“And what were the results?”

“I was clean.”

“No cocaine? No heroin or marijuana?”

“No.”

“No barbiturates? No amphetamines?”

“Nothing.”

During the break, I watched Priscilla wolf down a custard-filled doughnut, sip at her coffee while she accepted encouragement from Janet and Rebecca. Her wool sweater was a pure green and very dark; if she dripped custard onto the wool, no amount of Kleenex and water would take it off. But, of course, being perfect, she didn’t. Her movements were precise and delicate as she set her coffee on the railing, held a napkin beneath her chin, snipped off chunks of doughnut with her front teeth. All the while engaged in vivacious conversation.

Priscilla added another facet to her performance after Delaney called us back to work. As she described her release from prison, her job at Tucker Trucking, the pure joy of living a free life, her manner became animated, almost perky. Her head tilted to the left and her smile broadened; her hands came together several times in an abbreviated, silent clap. “I felt like I was going to family instead of work,” she explained.

“And how often did you report to your parole officer?”

“Every two weeks at first. Then once a month.”

“For how long?”

“For more than a year.”

“And you were employed at Tucker Trucking for this entire period?”

“Yes.”

I watched Latisha Garret, she of the stony face, nod her head in time to Priscilla’s responses, as if listening to music.

“Now, Priscilla, were you tested for drugs when you reported to your parole officer?”

“Yes.”

“Every time?”

“Yes.”

“And did your parole office make unannounced visits to your home and place of work from time to time?”

“Yes.”

“And were you routinely tested for drugs in the course of these unannounced visits?”

“Yes.”

“Did you ever come up dirty, Priscilla? Were you ever found to have drugs in your system?”

“Never.”

I turned to face the jury, changed the subject, while Priscilla, seemingly without effort, shifted personas. “Did there come a time, Priscilla, during this period, when your husband attempted to contact you?”

We flew, Priscilla and I, through this phase of her life, left it deliberately hazy. Yes, she’d come to believe that Byron had changed, that he, too, was ready to begin a new life. But, no, driven by cocaine and alcohol, he’d lied to her, trapped her, tortured her, promised to eventually kill her. Then, after she tried to escape, he’d placed the lid on the kettle.

“He told me if I left him, he’d kill my mother.”

From behind, I heard Thelma begin to sob. In front of me, a frowning Delaney snatched up his gavel, then slowly returned it to the desk as Thelma, muttering, “I’m sorry. I’m sorry,” fled the hushed courtroom.

“I think,” Delaney said after informing the jury that courtroom outbursts were not to affect their deliberations, “this would be a good time to break for lunch.” Once the jury had been safely removed, he turned to me, barely able to repress a smile, and said, “Mr. Kaplan, I trust you’ll see to it that Mrs. Barrow remains under control. Assuming she wishes to sit through her daughter’s remaining testimony.”

The air in the adjoining courtroom, once the team had gathered, was celebratory. Thelma Barrow, I remember, despite her pain, was especially exuberant. She took her daughter’s hands, stared, dry-eyed, into her daughter’s face, said, “You were perfect, darling. Just perfect.” A smiling Rebecca Barthelme stood behind them, her white hair floating out in seeming benediction.

With no place at this particular feast, I decided to go for a walk, maybe clear my head. I think if I’d made it, things might have turned out differently, but as I came into the corridor, I saw Rose Sweet talking to a reporter. She was very tiny, Rose Sweet, and a good deal older than Thelma, a hunched black woman standing in the shadow of a hulking reporter.

“How,” I heard him ask, “did it feel to hear your son’s character attacked by the woman who killed him?”

Behind them, a knot of reporters, including Phoebe Morris and Jay Harrison, waited by the elevator. They watched me, their eyes positively feral, for several seconds before they began to move. I wanted to flee, but I remained still as they swarmed around me. Somehow, despite having brushed off several of the same reporters as I’d entered the courthouse earlier that morning, I’d forgotten that the trial had meaning for the rest of the world, that there was a world beyond Sidney Kaplan and Priscilla Sweet.

“You can see for yourself,” I told them as I stepped back through the door and closed it in their faces, “exactly what’s happening.”

Later, I parked myself on a bench several rows behind Priscilla, pretended to busy myself with my notes while I ate a ham sandwich, tossed down a bottle of Coke. Priscilla was again animated, vivacious, but when I caught her eyes from time to time, I felt as if I’d cannonballed into an empty pool. Finally, in a quiet moment, she slipped away from her mother to join me.

“How’m I doing?”

I looked at her, tried and failed to produce a smile. “Your lipstick’s smudged,” I told her. “You need to fix it.”

Her smile remained in place; her eyes remained cold. “C’mon, Sid,” she urged. “Don’t be a party pooper. Life can be wonderful, if you choose to live it. If you refuse to let the past destroy the future.” She fiddled in her purse, produced a small compact, flipped the lid open, finally said, without a trace of detectable irony, “Life is all we have.”