The Good Lawyer: A Novel (29 page)

She crumbled onto the couch, buried her head in her hands, and began to cry.

“El, I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean it. I swear.”

“So I’m just some insensitive rich girl who doesn’t give a shit about anybody. Well I gave a shit about you. And now you can get the hell out of here! I’m going back home. You’re the only damn reason I’ve been staying in New York anyway.”

“El. C’mon. Just like that. I say one stupid thing and you’re gone?”

“One very stupid thing.”

She then gave me the thread that, for better or worse, I could weave into the rope to hold onto. “I’ll be in Atlanta. At home. My home. If you really give a damn.”

I stepped closer. “El?”

“Don’t. Just get out! Take the heating pad with you.”

I gathered my things and stopped by the front door. The sunlight behind her made her face and figure a haze. I waited a moment for the light to grow dim again so I could see more of her one last time.

But that heralding sun only shined brighter.

Chapter 57

“I
t’s Saturday. I figured you’d be on Jones Beach celebrating, not mulling around the South Bronx.” Father Kerres’ tone was caustic. He was chewing on a bread stick, the remainder of which was in his right hand. Without my having to ask, he opened the rectory’s screen door.

I stepped inside. “Kingsbridge is not exactly the South Bronx,” I said.

“It’s all the South Bronx, counselor, when you get right down to it.”

I followed Kerres to a small private room with a French desk and two small chairs. A crucifix hung on one wall opposite a framed photograph of the Pope.

“And what would I be celebrating, Father?”

“Oh, I don’t know, your getting the Guevara case dismissed? You tell me. In this room we also hear confessions.”

I sat down across from Kerres, who suddenly took on the air of a parochial school principal.

“I tell you what,” I said. “You can hear my confession, if I can hear yours.”

Kerres leaned back and crossed his legs. “You’re not a priest. And it’s sacrilegious to suggest otherwise.”

“Sacrilegious. That’s a big word. Sounds like one a lawyer would use.”

“A very good lawyer maybe,” he shot back.

“I used to think I was a very good lawyer. I also used to think I had very good instincts. I was wrong on both counts. But it didn’t have to be that way, if good men had done something.”

“Are you referring to me—or to you?”

“To both of us.”

“Speak for yourself, counselor.”

“Father, you’ve known Peter Guevara since he was a boy, since you rescued him from being raped in that orphanage bathroom—”

“What? I didn’t rescue him from anything. When I found him he was lying under the urinals naked from the waist down and writhing in pain. Four boys, older and much bigger, had held him in that bathroom for over an hour. After they all sodomized him, some more than once, they then took turns pissing on him. He was in the infirmary for almost a month, and didn’t speak a word for almost two.”

I had been staring at my shoelaces, wearing the same rumpled clothes from the day before, straining to make sense of Guevara and Kerres and why Guevara lied to me the day of his arraignment. But in my mind’s eye I kept seeing visions of the Yankee Stadium parking lot—Vinny announcing that the dead blonde’s blouse had been traced to a boutique in Danbury and Kerres fleeing the scene.

“Now, why
did
you come see me?” he asked abruptly.

“Let’s just say I found something out yesterday, something you probably knew already.”

“You mean that your client Peter, or should I say Pedro Guevara, is less than innocent?”

“Maybe I just don’t want to see another little boy molested in the Bronx or anywhere else.’’

“You mean it has nothing to do with the fact that you feel guilty as hell?”

“I was doing my job, Father.”

“Like the Nazis did in World War II. Is that your defense? It wasn’t one at Nuremberg. Why should it be for you?”

“Now wait a god damn minute. Whatever I came to know, I came to know after the fact. I’m not a cop, and I’ve got a professional ethic that swears me to secrecy. What’s
your
excuse? You knew about Guevara. You knew full well a little boy was abused yet you sat there, said nothing, and let him recant!” I stood and a bolo throb wailed at my left side. I moaned and dropped back into my chair.

“Are you all right?” Kerres asked.

“No, I’m not fuckin’ all right!”

Kerres handed me a couple of tissues, then fetched me a cup of water.

“I’ll make a deal with you,” he said. “You stop swearing, promise me you’ll never reveal the source, and I’ll tell you what I know about your client, Peter Guevara.”

I looked him square in the eyes. “Former client. Deal.”

Kerres grabbed the half-full cup of ice water I had placed on the end of the desktop and tossed it back like it was a shot of his favorite whiskey.

He started slowly, painstakingly, as if struggling with every word to quell the infection of silence that had been eating at his insides.

He began with a warning. “I’m sure you’ve met some bad characters in the course of your work. Forget them. They’ve taught you nothing about dealing with Peter Guevara.”

“Maybe he’s just crazy,” I said unconvincingly.

“Does he appear to you, in any way, to be someone not in control of every single nerve in his body?”

I remembered Guevara walking into detention after his arraignment and how quickly his tears stopped at the turn of his head, when he had no audience but me. But I had only to think back to yesterday, to his confession to Cantwell and his teary-eyed plea of innocence in the grand jury room, to draw the same conclusion.

“Peter Guevara is a very dangerous man,” Kerres said. “In appearance, he is cordial, generous, and responsible. But make no mistake, he has urges—wicked and insatiable.”

“You think he’s capable of murder?” I asked incredulously.

“Not only capable, but in fact guilty.”

I slumped back in my chair and wiped away the perspiration that beaded my forehead.

“Guevara is brilliant,” Kerres continued. “I have never beaten him at chess, even when he was thirteen and I twenty-three. At fifteen he mastered college calculus and learned to speed-read with phenomenal comprehension.” Kerres winced and looked away. “After Peter left the orphanage infirmary word got out about the attack. As a result he was taunted by practically every juvenile delinquent there. This went on for months. Of the four boys that attacked him, two got released, one ran away, and the other was found hanging from an oak tree. The official report declared it a suicide. Peter was questioned along with many other boys but never formally charged with any wrongdoing.”

According to Kerres by age fifteenth Guevara had bulked up to over a hundred and seventy pounds, which is also when administration officials began to suspect he too may be guilty of victimizing several of the younger boys. Conclusive proof of forcible sodomy was evident from medical examinations, but each time the injured boy would deny he was attacked, and nothing could be proven. When Guevara turned eighteen he left Saint John’s and took a job as a custodian in an elementary school about fifty miles away. Kerres would periodically call the school to inquire. Since there was no solid proof that Guevara had molested any children, Kerres kept his suspicions to himself. Although he had urged Guevara to go to college, Guevara wanted to get out on his own first and work then consider other options. Considering Guevara had been an orphan practically his whole life, Kerres figured this may just be the positive step of a mature and responsible young adult. And each time Kerres called the school the principal responded glowingly about Guevara. The school never looked better or cleaner.

“But appearances were deceiving,” Kerres said. Shortly after Guevara started his third year as custodian, a second grader in Special Ed accused him of sexual abuse. Seems an aroused Guevara rubbed up against the boy while both were fully clothed in a coat closet after school. The boy’s mother, who had been dating a local assistant District Attorney, pressed charges. Guevara was suspended as custodian pending the outcome of the case. He was represented by a public defender. The case got media attention, enough to prevent Guevara from getting any other local job. So he lived off his savings for three months, until the case against him fell apart. The little boy disappeared.

Kerres described Guevara’s attorney as a “young, eager beaver,” somewhat like me. Come the adjourn date following the boy’s disappearance the courtroom was packed. But instead of moving for dismissal of all charges due to the inability of the District Attorney to make a case without a witness, Guevara’s attorney asked the court for permission to withdraw as his counsel. The crowd roared with approbation.

All the local papers ran stories and editorials insinuating Guevara’s responsibility for the missing boy. Newspaper accounts continually carried photos of the grieving mother along with her two daughters. The oldest, a teenager, was especially distraught over her brother’s disappearance. At a press conference held one week after the public defender withdrew from the case, she lashed out at Guevara and criticized law enforcement for their failure to bring him to justice. The press headlined her outburst. One front page warned in huge red letters:
Sister Vows Revenge
.

“The young boy was never found,” Kerres continued. “After the public defender was removed from the case, another lawyer stepped in and, a month later, the charges were dismissed. A week later the public defender who withdrew from the case was found floating in East Lake, a mile from the elementary school where Guevara worked. An autopsy revealed the cause of death was not drowning, but strangulation. The case went unsolved. Guevara sued for back pay, won, then moved to the Bronx.”

Feeling as though something had been eating at my insides, I asked, “You mean Guevara hasn’t lived in the Bronx since he left the orphanage?”

“No. In fact, he’s the reason I’m in this church. It’s my way you might say of monitoring his actions.”

Kerres unbuttoned his collar and fingered a two-inch scar across his neck. “You see this mark here? I threatened to go to the police once and told this to our friend. I was standing on the altar of Saint Nicholas at the time. I thought that before God he would listen, maybe even get some help. Instead he took a knife to my throat. If I even thought again of going to the police, he said, he would kill me. I was petrified. I can’t tell you what that experience has done to me. I thought I was a strong man.” His voice cracked and his head dropped. “But, I am not.”

“I didn’t know. I—”

“There’s no way you could have.” His expression was gaunt and weary. It was the face of a man who had suffered, and suffered still.

“Father,” I said, “I don’t remember hearing or reading anything about the two murders you mentioned.”

“You wouldn’t have,” he answered, “unless you were living around Danbury, Connecticut.”

A photonegative of the dead blonde encrusted in the lawn of the Riverdale Towers flashed in my head.

Chapter 58

S
oft tree-topped mountains of spring green lined the Hutchinson River Parkway North and Route 684. When the highway curved along a wall of jagged rocks of silver and gray I pressed down harder on the accelerator and found Route 84. I got off at exit 5 and drove through a business district with a red brick firehouse, church steeple, one-story police station, and newly paved streets until I entered suburban Danbury.

Forty-two East Gate Road was the home of Rita Gillis and the Gillis family, minus Bobby Gillis, missing since two months after his eighth birthday. Determined as I was to identify the dead blonde, when I passed through town and saw Bailey’s Women’s Wear, I was deeply saddened by the thought that somehow she was connected to this family.

The panoramic quarter mile of East Gate Road cut through a hill where large homes were spaced hundreds of feet apart, and acres of lawn separated them from the narrow asphalt roadway.

Parking halfway over the grass line, I walked down a tarred three-car driveway to the front door of a sprawling one story house built into the side of the hill.

A comfortable sun had brought the temperature to almost seventy and the neighborhood was rife with springtime activity: open garages, bicycles on the lawn, distant music coming from an open car window, two teenage boys playing basketball on a hilltop driveway, a middle-aged man in tennis shorts jogging, leash in hand, with a frisky collie running alongside.

If not for a late model Cadillac in the open garage and several front windows cracked open, the Gillis home would have appeared unoccupied. I pressed the doorbell.

A slim, freckled, red-haired girl in her teens answered the door.

She eyed me from head to toe. I was unshaven and my suit was rumpled from the long drive. A screen door separated us.

“My name is Nick Mannino. I’m a lawyer from New York.”

Announcing my profession, although necessary, did nothing to alleviate the teenager’s look of suspicion. She bit down on the side of her lip.