The Good Lawyer: A Novel (6 page)

I hated the sound of that:
play video games in his apartment
. It seemed like a ruse, but the truth was, Peter Guevara had worked with kids his entire adult life. He loved kids. Nevertheless, the double entendre made me squeamish. It wasn’t long before the attorneys in my complex would quip: “Maybe he loved kids just a liiiiiiittle too much.”

Was an adult behind the boys’ fabrications? I made a note to dispatch our best investigator to interview Jose Chavez’s mother, Sandra, who Guevara claimed was a drug addict, a lunatic with all kinds of boyfriends. If someone goaded the boys into lying, she was the most likely suspect.

I ordered lunch in and grabbed a discarded
New York Post
.
The Spiderman Rapist
had again made headlines.

Chapter 8

“T
hey’re closing in on this Spiderman guy,” Vinny Repolla gasped. I had just downed a burger and fries when he phoned. “He raped a forty-year old nurse just two nights ago. Hooked a rope onto the roof and scaled down into her window. That’s his M.O. What the police can’t figure is how he knows where to strike. All four victims are women living alone, except the second one. She has a twelve-year old girl. When he found them together, he gave the woman a choice: her or her daughter. Then he locked the kid in a closet, and raped the mom. He then kept his word.”

“Did he hurt any of the victims?”

“You mean besides raping them?”

“Of course I mean besides raping them.”

“No. He just ties them up, puts duct tape over their eyes and mouth then rapes them. He even calls himself the Spiderman. Real smug about it too. Afterward, he thanks the women, apologizes for any roughness, and climbs back up the rope to the roof. One time as many as four floors.”

“A regular Charles Atlas,” I said.

“Anyway,” Vinny continued, “his latest victim got a good look at him before he taped her eyes shut. He’s black, medium skin tone, and completely bald, about five foot ten with a pencil mustache like Clark Gable. Hey, when this guy gets arrested maybe you could take the case, and you know, get me an exclusive. After all, I did right by you in today’s paper. No mention of that Court Officer emptying the courtroom.”

“OK, Repolla. I owe you one.” And why not. He was true to his word and he wrote like he spoke—with enthusiasm in every sentence. Besides, I was starting to like this guy. His story on the Guevara arraignment jumped off the page. And when did anyone ever read about a Legal Aid lawyer in a positive light in a widely circulated newspaper?

I said I’d see what I could do if or when this Spiderman guy got arrested. I made no promises.

I thought about the Spiderman’s ability to target his victims. “Say Repolla, what did the comic strip Spiderman do for a living when he wasn’t scaling tall buildings?”

“Holy shit! Yeah! I can’t believe the cops didn’t check this out. If this pans out, Nick, dinner’s on me. I’ll bring the girls.”

“I’ve got my own, thanks.”

“You married or something?”

“No.”

“Then like I said, I’ll bring the girls.” He hung up before I could say another word.

I called Shula Hirsch a few minutes later. You know you’ve become a hardened criminal defense lawyer when you can discuss the macabre modus operandi of a rapist who drops from the rooftops in the dead of night to methodically ravage his victims, then close the conversation with laughter and dinner talk. Many years later you think about these things and wonder. At the time, you take another sip of Coke, and plod on.

In my limited experience witnesses who want to nail your client upside down to a cross may call the District Attorney, the press, even your client with a few real or veiled threats, but they don’t call the defense attorney. Not usually anyway.

So I assumed Shula Hirsch would be supportive. However, charges like child molestation—in three separate instances and to three separate children—could sour even the best of friends and closest of relatives, no less a teacher of emotionally handicapped children. I’d settle for a credible and impartial character witness. Besides, after a conviction lawsuits would pour into the Board of Education, and all those connected by some duty of care to the children, directly or indirectly, would be sued. Mrs. Hirsch was his direct supervisor. I did not expect Miss Congeniality. And I didn’t get her either.

Only after holding for five minutes and twice assuring her that I was indeed Guevara’s attorney, did she set terms. She would not speak over the phone. She would see me privately the following day at 4 P.M., and only in her classroom at P.S. 92. I told her I’d be there. The entire conversation took thirty seconds.

I was sprinting down the hall, headed home, when Brenda called out to me. Eleanor was on the phone.

Justice had prevailed in Manhattan’s Supreme Court. She had won all the preliminary suppression hearings at the start of her robbery trial. Both the defendant’s confession and the gun he had used in the robbery would be introduced into evidence. A conviction was a lock. She expected a plea to a lesser C felony in the morning. Divorcing myself from an ever-constant defense posture, I congratulated her.

We made a date for Saturday night—dinner on Long Island. (The Island was my choice.) I could tell she wanted to talk, but at the risk of hurting her feelings I cut the call short. After a full day, and a double shift the day before, I was exhausted.

During the drive home I couldn’t stop thinking about Guevara—the day’s revelations, the battle the night before. Three little boys.

As I slowed the car to pay the toll at the Throgs Neck Bridge, like the bell signaling the next round of fighting, I heard the ringing squeak of the brake pads. Soon I would be exiting the Bronx. I tossed seventy-five cents into the wire-mesh basket.

Pressing down hard on the accelerator I squeezed the steering wheel until my hands ached, and I prayed, secretly, that I would never have to see the Bronx again. But I knew, come the next morning, no one and nothing would be able to keep me away.

Chapter 9

E
leanor called me at seven-thirty, shaking me from a dead sleep—my punishment for cutting our call short. She demanded to know what was wrong.

I told her about my flash of burnout the day before. She shot back that I was “working too damn hard,” and questioned the wisdom of my keeping the Guevara case.

Mom reiterated the same sentiment over breakfast. “These hours you keep sometimes. You look terrible!”

“I feel fine.”

“Maybe Rocco could get you a job with one of those firms in the city that keeps normal business hours.” She turned up her palms to qualify herself. “Nothing crooked. Your Uncle Rocco knows plenty of honest business people.”

“Forget it, Mom.”

Mom was the twelfth of thirteen children. Only her brother Rocco was younger by three years. Their mother died in 1930 when Mom was seven. Rocco had just turned four. They were the only children still living at home.

My grandfather was ill prepared to assume the dual roles of both father and mother; so he abandoned the matter of parenting completely and became a hardened taskmaster instead.

Mom became the only mother Rocco knew. She would see to it that he did his work, and ate properly. When he goofed off, she covered for him. Otherwise, Rocco would have to answer to my grandfather’s barber strap.

On a weeknight in December, when the temperature in East New York dropped to a record low six degrees, while shoveling coal into the furnace like he had done a thousand times before, my grandfather died.

Mom found him the next morning on his back, his eyes open, his hand on his heart, a look of resolve on his face. After the funeral Mom went to live with her married sister, Gina. Rocco, at age eleven, was left behind. No one wanted him. Several of the surviving brothers and sisters chipped in part of their inheritance and raised over a thousand dollars. They offered it to their brother in law, Vito, an unemployed drunk who beat their sister Julia regularly, if only he would take Rocco in. Vito jumped at the offer.

When Rocco awoke one night to find his sister on the kitchen floor—her jaw broken—two front teeth dangling in her mouth—four men could barely pull him off what remained of Vito after he pummeled him, first with his fists, then with a cast iron frying pan. Rocco was only fourteen when he was sent to Holbrook Juvenile Detention Farm just outside Cooperstown, New York. He would remain there until his eighteenth birthday.

Mom was the only one who showed up for his sentencing.

By the end of 1972 Rocco became underboss to Carmine Capezzi, head of the most powerful Crime Family in the country, and was running the rackets in all of Brooklyn. Uncle or not, he was both a scary and powerful figure in this young boy’s life. Consequently, the older I got, the more we drifted apart. Whether this distance was my saving grace, or my penance, I would never know.

I had kept Rocco, and his biography, from Eleanor, and not just because she was an assistant District Attorney. It was who she was—the Vernou name, the dispassionate old money—that I feared would drive her away from me.

Chapter 10

A
n extra helping of Aunt Jemima’s buttermilk pancakes and I was running late. Grabbing my coat and briefcase full of the morning’s cases I shouted a good-bye to Mom and ran out the front door. I had forty minutes to get to the Bronx.

With Cousin Brucie on the radio and music filling my 66’ Malibu via four corner speakers, my thoughts drifted…to Eleanor…the cool smell of the beach…the perfume in her hair.

Exiting the Cross Bronx Expressway I drove up the Grand Concourse to 165th Street then made a right at the corner, where a ramp led to a secure indoor parking garage. Not bothering to check in at the office, I walked briskly past Legal Aid’s entrance doors and back down the Concourse toward the Bronx Criminal Court.

The temperature was much colder than the Long Island morning I’d left behind, and wind added a chill to my every step.

I had cases on in AP-2, 3 and 6.

After parking my briefcase and coat in AP-2, I scoured the respective courtrooms and third floor lobby for my clients, half of which I feared I wouldn’t recognize.

It was 9:45 A.M. The courtrooms were overflowing with people. I hurried over to AP-3 and called the names of my three defendants scheduled to appear there. All were present.

One was an anorexic-looking prostitute named Wanda. At her arraignment Judge Schneider insisted on jail time. It was Wanda’s tenth arrest. Her pimp paid her bail of five hundred dollars. Greely, a haggard faced old jurist, now sitting in AP-3, would go along with the assistant D.A.’s recommendation of a two hundred fifty dollar fine or five days in jail.

The case was disposed of in a matter of minutes—a career prostitute’s guilty plea—my hundredth in the last two and a half years.

Exiting the courtroom’s swinging doors, I smacked flush into a woman. My files went flying. Court papers, subpoenas, notes and motions scattered across the lobby floor. I fell to my knees in a frantic attempt to restore all manner of paperwork to their respective folders. So did she.

I managed to grab three files, papers protruding, but intact. She got together another, and a police officer I first thought was unselfishly coming to my aid, retrieved the other two. He wanted a closer look—at her.

Ocean-blue eyes searing through her straight blond hair alternated between my own glances and the fumbling files in my hands. She wore a cream-colored waist length jacket and matching skirt, under which long silk-stockinged legs curved onto a shapely dancer’s body. A gold crucifix dangled from her neck. It was a wonder there were not more accidents in her wake.

“I’m really sorry,” she said. “I wasn’t looking where I was going. Have you got all your files?” The dark shadows under her eyes were impeccably covered by foundation make-up.

I poked the police officer with my elbow and thanked him. He apologized and stepped back.

“It’s all right,” I said. “No harm done.” It was easy being gracious to her.

She squeezed my hand, said “thank you,” and entered AP-3.

The police officer grinned.

My hand tingled from the gentle clasp of her fingers as I walked over to AP-6.

Administrative Judge Ernie Krenwinkle was on the bench. Circus clown, stand-up comedian, traffic cop, court calendar clean-up wizard, never was there a more outrageous character to rule the Bronx Criminal Court.

Running through the court calendar while taking felony pleas as an acting Supreme Court Judge in the Criminal Court, he gave new meaning to the term “speedy justice.” And in the process, created his own special intermediate appellate tribunal.

Whenever and wherever a particular case was calendared in his courthouse, if you could convince Krenwinkle your client was getting a real screwing before a particular judge, he would order the case pulled from its original Part and brought to him in AP-6.

And no ADA or judge would dare attempt to stop him.

Where handguns bounced only once on the streets of the South Bronx, and drugs plagued every facet of society there, Krenwinkle knew the limits of the law he spent the greater part of his life enforcing, and dispensed justice accordingly.