The Good Lawyer: A Novel (30 page)

An older, feminine voice with a New York accent called out, “Jess! Who is it?”

“It’s a lawyer in a wrinkly suit from New York!” Her eyes stood guard over me through the screen.

An attractive, dark-haired woman in a robe came to the door. She pushed shoulder-length hair behind her ears. The years had not done justice to her milky complexion.

“What can I do for you, mister?” She was giving me seconds to state my business or the solid white door would shut in my face.

As I stared up at her from the landing I realized that the only connection between the dead blonde and the Gillises was a blouse bought in Danbury, and a beautiful woman asking for me the very day after Guevara’s arraignment. A sickening feeling enveloped me.

When I didn’t answer she unlocked the screen, swung it wide and stepped forward, leaning brazenly against the doorframe. “If you came here to gawk at us, you can get in your car and get the hell out of here. I can have the police here in ten seconds.”

“Are you Mrs. Gillis?” I asked.

“Yes I am. Now what do you want?”

“I believe I have news about your daughter.”

Her face tightened. She nodded for me to enter.

I followed her through a sparsely furnished living room then into a dining room where I sat down next to a row of double-hung windows. At the bottom of a sloping hill was a partly covered in-ground pool. The water was murky green, the chain link fence around it bellied and broken, the concrete perimeter tattered and cracked. This pool hadn’t been used for years. Five years, I guessed.

I showed Rita Gillis my Legal Aid photo ID, and she grew pale.

“A public defender,” she said, “from the Bronx.” She looked at her daughter seated beside her.

“You know Peter Guevara?” she asked.

“I was his lawyer.”

“For molesting a child?” Her voice was as coarse as sandpaper.

“Yes,” I said gently.

Her strength and resiliency was hanging by tender threads. She was in no hurry to get to her last question.

“Donna, my other daughter, has been obsessed you might say with this Mr. Guevara. She could not reconcile what happened to her brother and that this—this man was never punished.”

“I can understand that.”

“She started to use cocaine. Her boyfriends supplied her. There’s no excuse for that, mind you. But she suffered so after…” Her voice trailed off. She lifted her head higher. “We all suffered.”

My stomach knotted and although I could only imagine the depth of this woman’s pain, I was not sure I could bear to be so close to it for much longer.

“Do you have a picture of Donna I could see?”

Rita Gillis gave her daughter a frightened nod, and the teenager went into a den off the kitchen. She promptly returned with a picture frame, and handed it to her mother. Rita Gillis placed it on her lap face down.

“Donna said she was going to stay with some friends who were vacationing in Spain. She said she needed to get away. She left us no address or telephone number.” There was a pathetic plea in Rita Gillis’ voice. “She was dying here. I was happy for anything that would bring about some change.” Her eyes searched around the room. “So she dyed her hair blond and in February took a shuttle bus to LaGuardia. We haven’t seen her since. She said she would contact us on her birthday.” Her face turned a ghastly pale. “Today is her birthday.”

She handed me the framed photograph.

It was definitely the same woman who I’d run into outside AP-3. She was slightly younger in the picture, and brunette. But the face in the photograph was without a doubt Donna Gillis.

“I met your daughter in Bronx Criminal Court. She wanted to talk to me, but didn’t know who I was at the time.”

Rita Gillis grabbed a doily off the dining room server and began wringing it in her hands. “She must have known you were Peter Guevara’s lawyer. He killed his last lawyer you know, although it can’t be proven.”

“Yes. I understand.” My voice wavered as I pondered how I was going to break the awful news to her.

“What happened to the case? You said you were Peter Guevara’s lawyer. Did you withdraw from the case too?” Her thin limbs looked like dangling steel cables.

“No, uh. I didn’t. The case…it concerned three boys.”

“In Special Ed like my son.”

“Two of the boys were, yes.”

She nodded once then looked out the rear windows.

I spoke quickly. “Two of the boys changed their stories. The third boy’s case was dismissed in the grand jury.”

She nodded again as her legs frantically bobbled up and down, and the doily now in her hand, disappeared in her tightened fist. She turned away, her eyes fixed on something out the rear windows.

I wrote a name and number down. The number was for the 50th Precinct. The name was Detective Phil Krebs, Vinny Repolla’s friend and police hook in the Bronx. I gave it to her younger daughter, along with my card and a
Daily News
clipping of Donna Gillis in her Bailey blouse and white pearls at the bottom of the Riverdale Towers.

Rita Gillis could barely catch her breath. I whispered in the young girl’s ear not to show her mother the photo, and to call someone close to them to come over to the house right away.

“I only wish I could change what happened,” were my lame last words to the mother and daughter who had now lost almost everything.

The daughter was holding her mother round the neck and shoulders as the older woman sobbed.

I backed out of the room feeling like a criminal who had violated what little remained of the peace and sanctity of their lives.

Chapter 59

I
used the time alone on the open road to analyze everything I had learned in the last day and a half. The shock to my system that came with the knowledge of Guevara’s guilt was still firmly in place. My own guilt seemed to be alive and well inside me like some errant antibody out to either destroy every cell and organ, or inoculate and cleanse me with new life and fresh breath. Only the warm sun above life affirming treetops and ridges of cut gray and brown assured me I was not losing my sense of civilization, and going completely mad.

Mom was washing the kitchen floor when I got home. I had been out all night without calling. I always called. I expected there’d be hell to pay. I yelled out to her with exaggerated enthusiasm as if the last twelve hours were just a bad dream and had never really happened. She asked me if I wanted something to eat then told me Eleanor called. I threw my briefcase onto the couch, walked briskly into the dining room and grabbed the wall phone in the kitchen without stepping on the wet floor.

“She called last night to tell me you were staying over. Said she picked you up at work and when you got to her apartment you were so tired you fell right to sleep.” Mom’s nonchalance annoyed me, as did the sound of the sponge mop running back and forth across the linoleum. “She’s such a sweet girl. Said you won your big case.”

She left the mop hanging in the sink and turned toward me.

“Nick, you look terrible!” She walked over and ran her hand across my forehead, as if by touch she would know where I had been in this rumpled condition and whom I had been with. “And you smell!”

I resisted the urge to phone Eleanor. I wasn’t sure why. Maybe I wanted to give her time to cool off. Maybe I wanted to show her I respected her enough not to chase after her when she was hurt and angry.

Later that evening Joey called. No mention of how I had ignored him of late except to say I was not my old self—an understatement of untold proportions.

I thanked him for noticing and promised, unconvincingly, that we’d get together soon.

“I know you twenty years, Nick. You need me I’m there. Don’t forget that.”

“I won’t. Thanks, Joe.”

I hung up and called Vinny Repolla at home. I asked him to set up a meeting with his cop buddy, Phil Krebs. When he asked why, I filled him in on the Danbury trip.

He called back ten minutes later.

The meeting with Krebs was set for Monday morning at the 50th Precinct in the Bronx. A friend of the Gillis family had already contacted Krebs. On Sunday Mrs. Gillis was going to the precinct to view photographs of Donna’s body. After spending two months in Potters’ Field there would be no point in viewing the corpse for identification. Vinny agreed not to print a word about Donna Gillis without first obtaining my consent.

Then in a quirky voice, Vinny added: “Oh, by the way, after Jose Chavez testified in the grand jury, his mother, believe it or not, dropped him off at school. That’s the last she saw of him. At 6 P.M. she reported him missing.”

“How do you know all this?”

“I got a copy of the missing person’s report. Considering the boy was a grand jury witness the same day, the cops acted on it right away.”

“They say a grocer saw a boy fitting Jose’s description walking off with a black man in the vicinity of that junkyard behind the school. This was around 5 P.M. Friday. Your boy Guevara was even taken in for questioning then released. I got that from Krebs. I’ve talked to him so much about you, the dead blonde and your hotshot cases, I guess I sparked his interest. Since he works out of Kingsbridge he arranged to be the detective assigned to the case. He was the one who called Guevara in. He said Guevara came right over, spoke freely, showed no malice toward the boy for bringing the charges, and told Krebs he believed it was the boy’s mother who was behind it all. Guevara also said he was home sleeping at 5 P.M. Friday and that you, of all people, could verify it.”

“I did call him about five. And he did sound like he was sleeping.” My side was beginning to throb again, along with my head.

“He even offered to take a lie detector test.”

“Did they give him one?” I asked incredulously.

“Nah. If he was black like the grocer described I guess they would have. But he’s not black.”

“No,” I answered pensively. “He isn’t, is he?”

I was overtired and all the bits of horrifying information I had learned were scattered in my mind like the residue of an explosion. I went to bed at midnight and tossed and turned for over an hour before slipping into a deep sleep.

When I awoke at 11A.M. I called Sheila at home. I needed the week off. I claimed burnout. Tom and Rick could cover my cases for me. She told me it would probably be OK and to call her at the office first thing Monday morning.

Monday. 3 A.M. I lay in bed not even trying to close my eyes, not even close to sleep. With stark clarity I envisioned that junkyard behind P.S. 92 at night—a darkened kodachrome and opaque as a blackened celestial sky. I could see the remains of decades of abandonment: the dilapidated fences, piles of metal and rubber garbage, pockets of vile undergrowth slowly compacted over time, festering, fenced, contaminated. A street level nightmare in a forgotten borough—where children played. A little boy on a bicycle was racing around on the sidewalk, innocent, unafraid, in danger. Straining to see his face as if some secret lie there, I prayed silently to myself as I fell off to sleep, that that little boy was not me.

Newsday. Monday. May 3, 1982. A 10-year old Special Ed student at P.S. 92 was found dead late Sunday night. His body had been stuffed into the corner of a wooden shed in a junkyard behind the school. The side of his skull had been crushed. His mother identified him by the New York Yankee jersey he wore. His name was Jose Chavez.

Chapter 60

I
t was well into the day shift at the 50th. The desk sergeant, a man in his fifties with gray bushy sideburns half way down his ears, pointed to a set of caged metal steps leading to the Detective Squad on the second floor.

At the top of the staircase a stenciled sign that read
Detective Squad
with an arrow pointing down the hall was taped to a wall. I passed several interview rooms cloaked with mini-blinds until the smell of burnt coffee, jelly donuts and stale cigarette smoke told me I was in the right place.

The guts of haphazardly strewn file folders littered the many desktops in the squad room. A white oval clock hung on a wall of peeling paint and chipped plaster sores.

I was fifteen minutes early.

A pot-bellied detective in a button down shirt showed me to Detective Krebs’ desk. Except for a ballpoint pen lying obliquely on the middle of a brown blotter, Krebs’ work area was meticulous.

From behind me a deep baritone voice called out: “Sir? Excuse me, sir.”

A tall, clean-shaven black man of about forty, with tightly cropped hair, waved me over. When I got to the doorway Vinny Repolla was standing there. He was wearing jeans and a short black leather jacket.

The detective directed us into one of the interview rooms down the hall. Vinny went in first, turned and put his index finger to his lips. After the door shut behind us Vinny gave me a hearty handshake and introduced Detective Phil Krebs.

Krebs shook my hand with one fast and firm pump then gestured for us to sit down.

“Did the Desk Sergeant take your name?”