Forced Entry (10 page)

With no help from her date, Betty raised her glass for a refill and eyed Jim Tilley carefully. She might, she knew, have appealed to Rose. Rose would certainly try to head off any potential ugliness. But Elizabeth Shirley Haluka didn’t appeal for help in situations she thought she could handle. Not after a third glass of burgundy and two plates of Irish lamb stew. Not after a second iced Stoli (without the twist). And especially not after making an irrevocable decision to take the giant ex-flatfoot, Stanley Moodrow, into her bed that night. She knew why Moodrow was leaving her to face Jim Tilley. It was because he wanted her, too. Wanted her enough to take a chance.

“I don’t like it,” Betty finally answered, sipping at her iced vodka. “But it’s not my fault. Most of those ‘technicalities’ come about because some gung-ho cop decides he can see a bag of dope lying on a dresser from his position on a rooftop sixty feet away. Or because, in his zeal for aggressive law enforcement, the same moron conducts an illegal search and the murder weapon can’t be used in court. And, even with that, I don’t get those kinds of dismissals in more than two percent of my cases. It’s not really a factor.”

“Look,” Tilley said, catching a meaningful look from Rose Carillo that prompted him to ask his question without anger. “Two months ago, I pulled a speed freak named Ronald Starise off another speed freak named Vera Blisso. Starise cut her face in a barroom argument; there were fifteen witnesses. Me and my partner hauled Vera to Bellevue and they spent four hours stitching her up. Pumped three units of blood into her while they were sewing. Yesterday I heard Starise got sentenced to a year for assault. I don’t think that’s right.”

“Well, don’t blame me,” Betty said. “I don’t even know the guy. Besides, you’re talking about plea bargaining. The big lie. That’s not anything the defense controls. Unless the case is very weak, the DA makes the offer.”

Moodrow, a glass of bourbon in his hand, was intrigued, despite his intention to keep out of it. “What’s the ‘big lie’?” he asked.

Betty grinned at Moodrow, unconsciously leaning toward him and away from Jim Tilley. “Once upon a time there was a politician named John Whore. This politician, in his endless quest for re-election, went out and took a poll. He asked the voters what they wanted to do about crime and the voters said, ‘Please kill all the criminals. But if you can’t kill them, throw them in jail and keep them in jail until the flesh rots off their bones.’

“John Whore (as a responsible servant of the people should) passed this message down to the police who began to make more and more arrests. At first, everybody was pleased as punch. The population of upstate prisons went from twelve thousand in the early seventies to more than forty-five thousand today. But then John Whore took a second poll and this time the voters said, “ ‘Hey, you guys are doin’ a great job. Really great. Just don’t make us
pay
for it.’

“Now here’s the truth, Jim: a little over ten thousand criminals were sentenced for felonies in the Bronx last year. Nine thousand five hundred involved defendants who pleaded guilty. That’s plea bargaining, right? Only five hundred involved trials. And those five hundred equaled the largest number of cases that, given the number of judges, Assistant DAs and courtrooms,
can
be tried. Understand what I’m saying? If the nine thousand five hundred criminals who plea bargained their way into lighter sentences all decided to ask for a trial, the system would come to a complete stop. Likewise, if the judges decided to send every one of those criminals to jail, the jails would be so overcrowded that some other judge would force the state to let most of them go. All this because a politician took a couple of polls.”

“So everybody pays,” Rose Carillo said. “If they don’t pay with money, they pay with bullshit courtrooms and junkies crawling through their windows.” Now that the kids were in their rooms, she was playing catch-up with rum and cokes. Her first instinct was to like Betty Haluka, recognizing Betty as a fellow survivor. But Rose had once been the victim of a brutal husband and had felt, firsthand, the effects of a criminal justice system that seemed to be failing everyone and she couldn’t shake off the simple solution to crime which had all the criminals safely in jail. “Because if those people go back out on the street, they’re gonna hurt other people. You know that.”

Betty said nothing for a moment, looking inward for the right words. When she did begin to speak, her voice was very gentle, as if she sensed the experience that lay behind Rose’s question. “There’s three kinds of defendants. First, there’s the druggies. Crack or dope, it’s all the same. They go out and commit minor crimes to keep themselves high. Or they become small-time dealers for the same reason. That accounts for ninety percent of my clients. Second, there are people like Henry Lopez, who Stanley told you about, who’re actually innocent. They get it worst, because the system is set up to
force
defendants to plea bargain. Third, there are psychopathic criminals capable of such mindless violence, no argument on Earth could justify their continued freedom. I can’t get used to them. Not even after twenty years in Legal Aid. Not after a thousand years in Legal Aid.”

“But you defend them, too,” Rose said. “You have to. And sometimes they go back out because of your defense.”

Betty thought about it for a moment, weighing her answer carefully. “Actually, they go back out because of plea bargaining. The cops made more than a hundred thousand arrests last year. I’m counting misdemeanors, too. The courts can’t deal with that and sometimes really bad people slip through the cracks. But remember, it’s almost always the District Attorneys office that sets the deal. I try to haggle, but the deal is usually presented as a take-it-or-leave-it proposition. It’s only when the prosecution’s case is weak and they’re afraid to go into a courtroom that anything like ‘bargaining’ takes place.”

“And how do you handle that?” Moodrow asked, sitting on the edge of his seat. “When you know someone should be put away forever and you hear the judge give him two years?”

“Or her,” Betty smiled. “We get women crazies, too.”

“Her or him,” Tilley said. “How does it feel?”

“Do you like everything about being a cop?” Betty asked. “You don’t have to do shit work sometimes?” She didn’t wait for an answer. “When I have no choice, I do it and try to forget about it. Like everyone else involved in the justice industry. Like the Assistant DAs and judges and even the cops.”

“Do you ever have a choice?” Rose asked, sensing something behind Betty’s answer.

“Once in a while, you have to even up,” Betty said, her voice darkening. “You have to step outside the boundaries of professional ethics. If you don’t, you go crazy.” Even as she went ahead with her story, she had a sense that she shouldn’t be saying this, but somewhere between the alcohol and Stanley Moodrow, she’d lost her sense of self-preservation. It drowned in sudden trust. “About six months ago, I went to one of the court pens, where they keep the prisoners, to confer with a burglar/rapist named Morton Heller. He told me he had to speak to me in private; there’s something I had to know. Usually, that means a client wants to inform on someone in exchange for less time.

“So I arranged for a conference room which took about three hours, because there aren’t enough of them, either, and I went in to talk with Mr. Heller. Fortunately, I had enough sense to let the Court Officer cuff him to the table. That’s standard procedure, but most of the time I don’t bother. I want my clients to trust me.”

Suddenly, the three of them, Moodrow, Tilley, and Rose, were sitting on the edge of their seats. All slightly drunk and waiting, like kids, for their bedtime story.

“The minute I came into the room, he started telling me about the women he raped and how he couldn’t wait to get out of jail so he could crawl into
my
room next. He told me exactly how he’d hurt me and what he’d do sexually and how he’d make me pretend to like it. And while he explained all this, he masturbated with his free hand.

“Nice, right? Of course, I’d seen all the complaints (he was up for four counts of rape along with assorted assaults, atrocious assaults, and robberies) and the depositions the victims gave were really bad. The rape was the least of it; he beat them, cut them, terrified them. And he dragged it out. He came into their apartments just after they went to bed and he stayed all night.

“Well, Morton Heller was stupid as well as disturbed and he had this sense of his own power, of his invulnerability, that set him up nicely for what I decided to do to him. I said, ‘Look, Heller, you can sit around jerkin’ off if that’s what you want, but I think there’s a good chance you could beat this.’

“The truth is I had just come from a meeting with the Assistant DA and I knew the case against Heller was rock solid. The DA was offering twelve years to life for a plea bargain, which means Heller would have to do at least ten, even if he took a plea. Heller, by the way, was only twenty-five, so if he did ten, he’d still be young when he came out. Young enough to ruin some more lives.

“Anyway, Heller stopped playing with himself and asked me how I could get him off. I said I didn’t think all the victims would show. I ran down a line of bullshit about two of the victims failing to pick him out of a lineup. I told him I’d contact any witnesses who could give him an alibi. I told him that since he never turned on the lights in his victims’ apartments, the identifications wouldn’t hold up.

“Maybe I should have been an actress, because the asshole bought the whole bit. I went back to the Assistant DA and informed him that my client was determined to go to trial and there was nothing I could do to dissuade him. You realize that once I speak to the client, the prosecution can’t get near him without tainting the case, so there was no way the Assistant DA could get a hint of what I was doing. He just shrugged his shoulders and we went before the judge and got a trial date.

“About halfway through the trial, Heller figures it out and goes crazy. Fortunately, I was questioning a witness at the time, so there was enough space between us for the court officers to get to Heller before Heller got to me. He tried to tell the judge what I’d done to him, but every defendant blames the lawyer when a case goes bad, so the judge didn’t want to hear about it. He asked Heller if he’d like to change his plea to guilty and Heller was so crazy by this time he agreed.

“Boom! Down comes the gavel and two weeks later, the judge sentences Heller to the max on every charge: four counts of rape; four counts of sodomy; two counts of felonious assault; two counts of aggravated assault; four counts of kidnapping; four counts of robbery. It adds up to life plus a hundred and forty-five years. Case closed.”

There is a unique moment in the lives of lovers. A mostly unremembered eyeblink that inevitably drowns in a wave of lust. It is the moment when man and woman are naked for the first time; when eyes slide across vulnerable flesh. Betty Haluka looked over at the giant who walked toward her. His body ran in a straight line, from his armpits across his ribs, his waist, his hips, his thighs. The difference—the ultimate injustice—in size between men and women passed quickly through her consciousness. He was monstrously big; she could exert no physical force against him. To voluntarily accept that surrender; to knowingly be that vulnerable—she could not complete the act without trust. The emotion was implied in the touch of his lips on hers and when her nostrils were full of the fragrance of the hairs on his chest, she took hold of him and leaned forward to whisper in his ear.

“You can forget about getting on top.”

When Moodrow came back to himself, the F was pulling into the Continental Avenue station, one express and five local stops further than he’d planned to go. He glanced at his watch as he left the train to wait for an express going in the opposite direction and noted that he’d be a little late for the meeting with Betty’s Aunt Sylvia, which was no big deal. He didn’t expect much to come from his trip. Maybe, if the place wasn’t too far gone, he’d have a private talk with the pimp or one of the dealers. See if he couldn’t scare them away.

T
HE SECOND MEETING OF
the Jackson Arms Tenants’ Association, Sylvia Kaufman noted from her position at the front of a hastily rented bingo room at St. Ann’s Roman Catholic Church, was going to be far better attended than the first. Unfortunately, the tenants, instead of uniting around their anger at the abomination that had taken place in the Parks’ apartment, were standing in little ethnic knots, talking among themselves as if protecting state secrets: five families of Koreans, with wives and children near the folded bingo tables; a dozen Asians, Hindu and Moslem, united in their distrust of the whites who, they believed, controlled their destinies; a large group of the old-timers, led by Mike Birnbaum, who liked to blame all problems on the ‘new people’; and, finally, the Hispanics (including a group of Mexicans she hadn’t known existed before this evening) surrounding the Cuban Almeydas and two Colombian families who’d been in the building for almost ten years.

Curiously, none of the groups appeared to be intimidated and Sylvia wondered if they were showing off for each other or if they were too angry to be afraid. Certainly, some of the tenants
were
intimidated. Yong Park and his family had secluded themselves behind closed doors. Their fruit and vegetable business was shuttered while they prepared to move into a two-family building in Flushing, a building owned by Mrs. Park’s brother. And Myron Gold was going, too. Just like that. Announcing to Sylvia that his mother, Shirley, couldn’t take the winters anymore—not after the surgery. They were Florida-bound as soon as the paperwork could be completed on their Ft. Lauderdale condo.

Shirley Gold had kept her head lowered all through that conversation, wanting to show neither her tears nor the unhealed scars from the cancer surgery on her jaw. She and Sylvia had been neighbors, if not friends, for decades; there should have been a better way to part. But Shirley Gold
was
tired. Haggard, really; and the tragedy that had fallen on the Park family only added to it.