The Good Lawyer: A Novel (13 page)

As time passed and business flourished, Rocco made more for Capezzi than the Brooklyn
capo
ever expected. As a result Capezzi cut Rocco a better deal. He knew Rocco was a find, a true old world mobster with brains, guts, and steel hard loyalty, and Rocco had a keen sense of the politics of crime—the fast and hard nature of the business.

Rocco got rich. Capezzi got richer.

In the underworld of crime Rocco’s reputation grew as a no nonsense
capo
who managed a tightly run operation. His word was granite, the loyalty he gave and demanded unquestionable. Cross him and die. There were no warnings.

With the reigns of power, however relatively and temporarily secured, money poured in, in truckloads. As a result Rocco began to funnel his newfound wealth into real estate: dozens of two, three and four family houses scattered throughout Brooklyn, all owned by shell corporations, all managed by Rocco and his crew. Rent was not hard to collect.

Come 1954 however, with the increasing enormity of Rocco’s operation, even real estate could not cover the growing cash profits. Rocco needed a steady business and an easy constant vehicle for laundering money.

At Rocco’s direction and with his recipe, on my birthday, July 29th, 1954, Sallie opened up their first pizzeria on the corner of Parkside Avenue and Nostrand. Come 1958 Rocco had ten pizzerias scattered throughout Brooklyn. Add laundered mob money, and no single store, pizza place, or restaurant chain in the state declared more on the book’s income.

Three months after the first pizzeria was opened, I was baptized.

Out of love for her brother and to ensure my ultimate safety and survival in a way few mothers could, Mom made Rocco my godfather over the privately adamant, but publicly quiet objection of my biological father.

Rocco arrived at my christening in a sharkskin suit, and to Mom’s surprise, with a date. A catered affair at the Parkside Lanes was but one of two gifts from the godfather himself. The other, two hundred shares of AT&T stock, and in my name only.

Mom had never seen Rocco happier.

But there was more.

Rocco Alonzo, for the first time in his life, was in love.

I slapped down hard on my knees. “How come I never heard this?”

Mom glanced at the clock on the TV and grabbed her coat. “I’m late for poker. Some other time, maybe.”

“Oh, no you don’t. And what do you mean, maybe?”

She kissed me on the cheek and rushed out the front door. I ran after her.

She paused by the driver’s side door. I was a few steps behind. “Your uncle loves you, Nick. Whatever happens, you remember that.” She started her Corolla and rolled down the window. “I love you too, Nick.”

I watched her turn up Kirkwood Avenue until she made a left and disappeared.

“And I love you, Ma,” I whispered.

I went back inside and prepared my own special tranquilizer of chocolate ice cream and Coca-Cola then went to bed.

Out of my night table drawer I pulled a paperback copy of
The Great Gatsby
. I had kept it there since taking an English Lit class in college. I read the first page, relishing the poetry of its beginning:
“In my younger and more vulnerable years…”

Then, my thoughts wandering, I flipped to the end.
“…So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”

I drifted off to sleep.

Chapter 25

R
ain pounded the Bronx Criminal Courthouse. Television crews armed with cameras propped on their shoulders like bazookas covered in plastic scrambled on the sidewalks and curbs rushing to secure a spot outside AR-1 where Oscar Jefferson, the prime suspect in the Spiderman rapes and murders, was about to be arraigned.

I parked in a garage a block away and raced, umbrella in hand, briefcase in the other, to the Sheridan Avenue entrance. The doors were locked. They were never locked before.

I trotted to 161st Street hugging the building, turned the corner and headed for the main entrance. News vans and broadcast trucks crammed every inch of curb, and there were more police cars double- and triple-parked than were needed to quell the worst inner city riot. Traffic was at a standstill. Inside the courthouse, barricades had been set up just a few feet from the escalators leading to and from the second floor. Tables stationed beside three short makeshift aisles were used as a security canvas. Every civilian was frisked before being allowed to enter. A court officer I knew noticed me at one of the checkpoints and motioned me through after a cursory check of my briefcase. Krenwinkle had called for the heightened security, he said.

After the murder of the Brooklyn cop’s ex-wife and baby, every newspaper characterized the Spiderman with a different printable expletive.
The Daily News
declared the killer of the infant “the most hated man in New York”. And no group wanted him dead more than the New York City police force.

In the rain, the rush, and the rigors of courthouse security that morning, the paradox of fate had come full circle; hundreds of cops with holstered guns at their sides, and hatred in their hearts, passed through checkpoints undisturbed.

The lobby outside AR-1 was packed like Times Square on New Years Eve. Cameramen were assisted by crewman with overhead lights on long silver poles. TV reporters, several of whom I recognized from the evening news, congregated near the closed courtroom doors, and it was hard to tell who was more blood thirsty: the public, the media, or the blanket of uniformed cops gathered in the rear of the lobby.

I ducked into the hidden corridor that ran behind the courtrooms and entered the rear of AR-1. Robert Cantor, a Legal Aid Major Offense Bureau attorney working out of Complex C, had the Oscar Jefferson file in his hand. I still had my coat on and my hands were soaked from holding my umbrella. Cantor must have owed someone in our Complex big time to be working arraignments. As a Major Offense lawyer he handled only the most serious of cases, and one of the perquisites he enjoyed was the elimination of all arraignment duties.

He caught my look of concern. “What’s the matter Mannino, you want the Spiderman?”

“I think I got this guy on another case,” I said unconvincingly.

“Bullshit. This guy’s got no priors. If you want to arraign the case, just say so. I’ll probably wind up with it anyway.”

“I want the case,” I said, and with a flip of the wrist he handed it over. I thanked him.

“No problem, hot shot. You need any help, let me know.”

Chapter 26

O
scar Jefferson sat like an obedient little boy behind a table in the back of the interview area of pre-arraignment detention.

“I knew I never should have taken that locket,” he said while looking down.

Believing I was about to hear more incriminating statements, I took a seat across from him and signaled him to keep his voice down.

“Why do you say that?” I asked.

“You my lawyer right?” He was staring at the business card I had placed on the table between us. “You’re no D.A., cop or detective tryin’ to trick me?”

“I’m your lawyer,” I said emphatically. “The courtroom is out there and you’re about to be arraigned on a burglary charge.”

“Burglary? I went into that apartment to put up window guards ‘cause of her baby. I’m the custodian. When I was moving the crib to get to the window, the locket was on the floor so I picked it up. Grace was in the kitchen feedin’ the baby.”

I braced myself for the gory details to come.

“So Grace says I should keep it, as a tip. It was a cheap gift from her no account husband she says. It was pretty and all, but I really didn’t want it. A couple of bucks woulda’ been better.”

“Did you tell this to the police?”

“Sure I did. For twelve fuckin’ hours! And the more I repeated it, the more they hit me in the head with a fuckin’ phone book. They punched me in the kidneys too. One crazy fucker kicked me in the balls. I thought they were gonna kill me. They wanted me to say I killed Grace and her baby.”

“Are you all right now?” I asked, even though he looked fine—his lack of hair and beard compensating for that grungy, tired look I’m used to seeing on defendants after days of pre-arraignment detention.

“I’m OK. Just wanna get outta here.”

“I can understand that, but I don’t want you making any more statements to anyone, especially the police. Anything you say, they’ll use against you if they can.”

Jefferson listened like a nervous pupil. With the fluorescent light fixtures beaming down on his smooth head, his complexion seemed lighter than it actually was. His small straight nose led me to believe there was some Caucasian in his background. I looked at his hands. They were not large by any means. Veins lined his muscular biceps and forearms. I asked him to take his shirt off so I could see for myself if the cops had left any bruises. This was only partly true. I wanted to check his physical condition. The Spiderman had to be built like a gymnast with lean, cut muscles. Jefferson was built exactly that way. And he had no bruises.

Vinny Repolla’s police sources had told him that Jefferson always wore a wig to cover his bald head, and that his prints were found all over the apartment.

“Do you shave your head?” I asked, pretending not to know the answer.

“No. I lost all my hair at the age of ten,” he said as if repeating this for the thousandth time.

“How’d that happen?”

“Bananas. I was livin’ with my father on a chicken farm outside Macon, Georgia. One day I ate about a dozen bananas and got real sick. A few weeks later my hair fell out. The doctor said it would grow back, but it never did.”

He looked down and told me about the teasing he endured from other children, until he moved to Jamaica, Queens at the age of fifteen where all the kids at school thought he looked cool.

An only child, his mom died of pneumonia when he was six. I asked about his father, and he told me that he passed on a year ago after a long bout with cancer.

As we spoke Jefferson never stopped drumming the table top with his fingers and bouncing his knee. He looked at me and grimaced. My subtle search into his background for something, anything that could have created a maniac killer, was evidently not appreciated. He demanded, in kind, to know about my own family.

“My father is dead, too,” I said, meaning my stepfather. (I had no idea where the sperm donor, as I often called him, was.) “And I don’t have any brothers or sisters either.”

Jefferson stood. “We both know I’m not here for some burglary. I didn’t get hit with a phone book and beat to shit for no burglary.”

“Oscar, I’m here to help you, if I can. You’ll just have to trust me on that. Now I can buy what you told me about the locket, but why were your prints all over the apartment?”

“They’re not all over the apartment. They’re probably on the night table next to her bed, the headboard…” He put his hand to his head as he thought, and I leaned back, astonished by his candor. “Some of the kid’s toys, a toy chest. Yeah, definitely the toy chest.” His eyes widened as his face lit, not in shock or horror, but in remembrance and satisfaction. I was growing nervous at the ease of his recollection and his lack of remorse. “Some chairs, a small kitchen table…I can’t think of anythin’ else.” He sat down and nodded, as if marking an accomplishment—pleased to have remembered so much. I expected nothing short of a full confession to follow.

“How did your prints get on all those things?”

“Because I touched them.”

I demanded to know why. He calmly told me that he had helped Grace unload a van filled with these items one week before the murders. She had been living in the building for about a month and gave him twenty bucks afterward.

“Did anyone see you moving her stuff in?” I was trying to test the authenticity of a near perfect explanation for the prints, assuming of course the lady in residence had not cleaned or waxed her furniture in a week.

“A cop. Musta been her ex-husband. She was real cold toward him. He brought her the baby. I was just puttin’ some stuff down in the kitchen when he walked in.”

“He had a key?”

“No. The door was open.”

“What did he say? What did he do?”

“He didn’t do nothin’, just gave Grace the baby and looked at me real weird.”

“And, what did
you
do?”

“Nothin’. I just finished puttin’ some boxes against the wall where she told me to and stood there waitin’ for my money. I felt funny being there. They were talkin’ about when he would see the baby next, you know, like they were doin’ business or somethin’. Then he looked at me like who the fuck am I, and Grace, you know, saw this and got me my twenty. Then I left.”

“Did you ever see this cop again?”

“Nope.”

“Did you ever see Grace again?”

“I saw her by the mailboxes about two days before…you know…what happened.”

“Did she say anything to you?”

“Just hi…‘Hi Oscar’. That’s right. That’s what she said. I remember exactly because I thought it was nice she called me by name, friendly like. She seemed like an all right person.”