The Good Lawyer: A Novel (28 page)

Perfect lawyer.
That sounded good enough for me.

Chapter 54

S
everal attorneys from Complex C, including Tom Miller and Rick Edelstein, who were present the night Guevara was arraigned before Judge Benton, met me for lunch in the Fun City Diner on Sheridan, across the street from Criminal Court. Tom handed over a case of mine I still had to cover in Supreme—a sentence before Judge Graham—Raymond Jackson, my Charlie Farkas predicate felon.

I decided not to tell Jackson that Farkas Sr. had died since the plea date.

Ecstatic over the win in the grand jury, I bought lunch for everyone.

Jackson didn’t show until 4 P.M. And who could blame him. Graham didn’t. He sentenced him to the mandatory—two-to-four years, with a recommendation for the earliest parole possible.

While the mandatory sentence was expected, my heart sank anyway. I felt sadder still when Jackson took one of my hands in both of his and thanked me for caring.

Dead or alive, Charlie Farkas Sr. was one lousy son-of-a-bitch for advising him to plead guilty to that bogus felony nine years ago that had saddled Jackson with predicate felony status.

Raymond Jackson should not have gone to jail.

At the office, congratulations came from every corner of Legal Aid. Tom and Rick, true friends and comrades-in-arms, spread the word of the Guevara dismissal as if it were their victory as well as mine. Sheila and Peter gave me a victorious handshake and each, in their own way, winked at me in approbation. This win was special.

Brenda had returned to work and been back a mere week since Jasmine’s passing. Before she left she blew me a kiss and reminded me to check my phone messages. One, she said, sounded important. She put it on top. It was from Arthur Cantwell.

“Is this Nick Mannino, famous criminal defense attorney?” Arthur spoke with familiar affection, probably because I’d given him more defendants to polygraph in the previous six months than all of Bronx Legal Aid combined.

“I may be on the rise but I ain’t there yet,” I responded. “What can I do for you Arthur?”

“Well Nick, it’s more like what I can or can’t do for you.”

“Arthur buddy, I’m sorry on this one. We won’t need that polygraph on Guevara after all. The grand jury dismissed all charges this morning. He testified like a champ.”

There was momentary silence on the other end of the line. “We’re talking about Peter Guevara, the teacher’s aid charged with molesting three boys?” Arthur sounded like something was about to cut off his air supply. His voice was shaking.

“Yeah Arthur. What’s the matter?”

“He was in here this morning. He asked me to meet him at 8 A.M. Said you’ve been asking him about the test, and that you’d be out all morning and I should wait until after lunch to call you with the results.”

“OK. Well, he passed, didn’t he?”

“Nick, he didn’t take the test. Or rather, he couldn’t.”

“Arthur, what the hell happened?”

Cantwell answered in a low groaning staccato. “Nick, Guevara confessed to everything,” then in a barely audible voice added, “and more.”

Chapter 55

W
hat made the confession to Cantwell even more bizarre was Guevara’s insistence that he be allowed to write it down and put his signature to it. The “more” Cantwell had spoken of was Guevara’s horrifying revelation that prior to molesting Jose Chavez, Carlos and Rafael Rodriguez, he had, in the last eight or nine years, fondled, sexually abused and sodomized over one hundred other children, mostly little boys and mostly orphaned. This included the mentally handicapped and even the disabled.

I called Peter Guevara and demanded to see him immediately. Apparently awoken from a deep sleep, he spoke irritably. He told me he would come by some time tomorrow.

“The hell you will,” I snapped.

In a hollow baritone he replied, “I’ll be right there.”

I slammed down the phone. A surge of foul liquid rushed up my throat. I thrust back my chair and grabbed the small plastic wastebasket at my feet. After knocking my forehead into the edge of the desktop, I vomited into the container.

Since my heaving had not drawn anyone’s attention, it soon became apparent to me that everyone within earshot had gone home. The fourth floor was graveyard quiet.

I rushed to the men’s room.

In less than fifteen minutes I returned to my office. Wearing Jordache jeans, black boots and a tight red polo shirt, Guevara sat dutifully in front of my desk, his back to the door.

“What can I do for you, counselor?” His lips pursed in annoyance, and I could sense him gauging the necessary limits of his tolerance, his eyes darting like lasers up at the ceiling. They were fixed on the movement of a rodent’s tiny clawed feet above the suspended tiles. A sinister smile appeared and disappeared so quickly I wasn’t sure if it was real or imagined.

I spoke between clenched teeth. “What’s the hell is going on? How do you confess to a life of child rape and sodomy than an hour later lie your ass off in the grand jury?”

“Let me help you through this,” he said, like a crooked undertaker calculating a bereaved widow’s net worth. “My communications with Mr. Cantwell, orally and in writing, are privileged.” His glanced up at the ceiling then down at me again. “As are all my conversations with you.”

“Your privileged conversations with me did not give you the right to perjure yourself in the grand jury this morning.”

“If I committed perjury Mr. Nickel-Ass Mannino, then you suborned it. That’s the right word, isn’t it, counselor? Because suborning perjury is a felony too, isn’t it?”

My heart was pounding and I could feel my chest constrict.

“When I told you in private this morning about my confession, you should have told me not to testify, instead of telling me to put it all out of my mind and recite the script you’d been pounding into my head all week.”

What came over me next upon hearing this inimitable fabrication, I would never be able to explain. Whether the product of truculent irrationality or an explosive flash of insanity, I lunged at Guevara, visions of my fingers and thumbs ripping his throat open.

With the agility of a gymnast he jumped up, turned, and forcefully shoved me away.

I crashed into the side of a metal filing cabinet and dropped to the floor.

Pain shot through my ribs. With my right arm wrapped around my abdomen I looked up. He was towering over me.

“I always knew you had it in you, counselor.” An exaggerated smile grew on his face like some horrific cartoon.

I sat up and leaned against the filing cabinet. Though the pain heightened my senses, it was all the movement I could muster for the moment.

“You’re a fucking low life pig,” I gasped.

His eyes drew down on me like a viper deciphering when and how to strike. Then his smile returned, only this one had a brash charm and hint of malevolence. He mimed a picture frame by joining his thumbs and index fingers. Pressing an index finger down, he pretended to snap a picture.

“Gotcha.” He chuckled. “You did a picture perfect job counselor. As I knew you would.”

He turned and smugly walked down the hallway. The stairwell door sprang open then slammed shut.

I managed to pull myself up onto a chair. The pain in my left side had gone from sharp to a dull throb. I phoned Eleanor saying nothing but “come get me”—my Rolodex already open to her name and number.

I limped outside into the Bronx night and leaned against a short chain link fence that ran the corner of 165th Street. I tried desperately to find Eleanor’s BMW behind the hundreds of blinding headlights that raced up the Concourse.

I have no idea how long I waited, but at some point a horn blared from a double-parked car. I eased myself inside and Eleanor gave me a kiss.

Sinking back into soft leather, I refused to look her way. Intermittently she asked if I was all right. With head down I refused to answer, and then told her everything.

When we got to the FDR Drive and the East River and the area inside the car brightened, I looked over to see her reaction. Her face looked as if she too had been victimized. She calculated all too quickly the powerless position I was in.

As Guevara’s attorney, revealing knowledge of his guilt or past crimes was in strict violation of attorney-client privilege. Nothing I could say would ever be used against him in a court of law. And I would probably be disbarred if I tried.

But what had Guevara said or done to get Carlos and Rafael to recant with such childish denials?
That’s what a faggot does…I don’t want to see Peter go to jail
. Did he start by convincing Carlos that a guilty verdict would brand him a
faggot
by court order, in the eyes of the law? Was Carlos so fond of Guevara and at such a loss for affection that he wanted Guevara back, even at the cost of further sexual abuse?

A stabbing pain in my head blinded me for an instant. I turned away from Eleanor and shut my eyes.

Like the sole passenger on a runaway train it was only a matter of time before I soared off the mountainside. And there was nothing I could do about it.

Chapter 56

E
leanor stayed close and held my hand as we sat on her living room couch. My ribs throbbed like I’d been hit by a bat and my head swam with a jumble of disconnected thoughts.

“I should have been suspicious when Guevara kept missing his appointments with Cantwell,” I said.

“But why confess to Cantwell at all?” Eleanor asked. “What did he have to gain?”

“Control,” I said with self-centered annoyance.

“Over what?”

“Over me. He could easily say I knew about the confession to Cantwell and had him testify anyway. And just so I could win my first big case! I get tried for suborning perjury, and Guevara’s the prosecution’s star witness. Jesus Christ! The bastard cried in the grand jury! He confesses before breakfast to molesting a hundred kids then cries to twenty-three people about how he’ll miss working with children.”

“And now he holds a felony charge and loss of your license to practice law over your head.” Eleanor hesitated. “So that when he does it again, you won’t rat on him.”

I groaned as I adjusted my sitting position. “It’s got to be more than that. If he hadn’t confessed I would still think he was innocent. Besides, I’ve got a house full of clients’ guilty secrets. He wouldn’t be the first to come back through the system. He knows that. There’s got to be something else he’s afraid of. Some other way I could hurt him.”

“Like what? Like how?” Eleanor’s face was full of concern—and fear.

I spent the night crumpled on Eleanor’s couch, sleeping on my stomach and right side mostly. Eleanor tended to me into the wee hours, the heating pad she gave me never leaving my side.

When I awoke at 6 A.M. she was sleeping on the end of an area rug at the foot of the couch, wearing only socks, panties and a Brown University sweatshirt. The bruise on my side looked like a storm cloud and was still sore, but my mobility seemed less hampered. Eleanor woke at seven and we had breakfast by the window overlooking the East River. It was a damp gray morning, but the sun in the east was cracking through a cloud cluster hovering somewhere over Queens, giving the river a golden sparkling overlay.

I had missed dinner the night before and ate my eggs and toast ravenously. I could tell that Eleanor was still tired. My good night’s sleep had been at her expense. She patted her cheeks in a renewed wake up call, but to no avail. Her face still had that puffy sleepy look, and her beautiful eyes had yet to completely open.

“Where are you rushing to?” she asked.

“Nowhere. I’m just hungry.”

Her weary eyes fixed on mine. “I want you to walk away, Nick. Please. I want you to walk away now.”

“What?”

“I’ve been up half the night thinking, watching you, remembering how we met, remembering Atlanta. You’re so relaxed and at ease away from your work. Maybe now is the time to resign, take a position with a private firm. It doesn’t have to be criminal defense work.”

I stood up and stared out the window, angry that the sunlight shimmering off the river’s surface hadn’t the magical power it appeared to. I peered down at Eleanor still seated by the window.

“So I should just step aside as if there’s been no children abused, no serial rapes or murders, no baby girls killed, no innocent defendants murdered in prison. Oh, and here’s a new one for you. No more dead blondes hurled kicking and screaming off apartment buildings!”

“What? She was murdered? Why didn’t you tell me?”

“The moment never seemed right. Would you have told me to walk away from that too?”

She took a deep breath in an attempt to fight back tears. “You’re being cruel.”

I felt sick and half crazed, and reigned down on her, wanting to hurt her, to hurt myself.

“How convenient. I just throw everyone and everything up there in the Bronx to the dogs, just to run away and marry”—I paused, but not long enough to save myself, to save us—“just to run away and marry some rich girl!”