The Good Lawyer: A Novel (9 page)

I was trembling. My thoughts shifted to the junkyard behind P.S. 92—its heaping debris piled higher than its dilapidated fences. Secrets were there too, contrived and stirring, like a spreading contagion.

Eleanor pulled me closer, and with one sweet smile she drove away these pawing meandering thoughts.

But they would soon return, and when they did, she would not be present to save me from them.

Chapter 16

T
he Bronx Supreme Court is a classic courthouse structure. Towering columns hold up an ancient Greco-Roman architectural design. Over fifty wide stone steps lead up to the entrances in front and back and on the Grand Concourse side of the building. Midway up these steps, I heard someone call out to me in a loud hoarse voice. It was my uncle, Rocco Alonzo.

I cringed.

A black limousine sat at the curb on 161st Street just off the corner. Uncle Rocco, in black suit, white shirt (top button opened), and black patent leather shoes, began to scale the stone steps with two younger Italians in overcoats a few feet behind.

“That’s my nephew Nickie.” The two henchmen looked at me blankly. “He’s a lawyer with Legal Aid.”

A broad smile never left Rocco’s face as he kissed me on the cheek.

“What are you handling, a murder case in here or what?” he asked, pinching the sides of my face. “You know my nephew here never lost a trial.” The two overcoats were now standing beside us. The youngest smirked contemptuously. Fortunately for him, Uncle Rocco didn’t see it. He was busy covering my eyes with his hands as a flash camera went off in our faces. The two young Italians reflexively reached inside their overcoats then casually drew their arms out empty handed as a reporter sped away. “No need for you to be photographed with us Nickie,” Rocco said apologetically.

I figured, at worst, the flash caught the back of my head. “No problem, Uncle Roc.”

“Sure Nickie.” There was a glimmer of sadness in his eyes.

We walked past the huge columns and into the courthouse. An elevator was waiting. All four of us got in. Rocco and his boys were headed for the third floor. I was on my way to the all-purpose Supreme Court Parts on the fourth. When the elevator opened on three, Rocco asked me to step off so we could “talk.” He motioned for the overcoats to wait as we walked down the hallway.

There was a coarse edge to his voice that softened as he began to speak.

“Your mother called me. Says you’re workin’ too hard. Everything all right, Nick?”

I patted his shoulder in a not-to-worry fashion. “Just a tough case. Nothing I can’t handle. Don’t worry. Really.”

“You know I only want the best for you. Not, not this.” He nodded at the young Italians so I would understand he was referring to their life—to his life.

“I know, Uncle Rocco.”

He was getting emotional and it didn’t suit him, not the Rocco I knew. I wanted to change the subject.

“So what brings you to the Bronx?” I asked.

He took a long deep breath. “One of my boys, a neighborhood kid”—he revised his words, but not their import—“got into trouble. So I came to help out the mother. You know how it is.”

“I’m sure she appreciates it.”

He smiled, knowing I would ask no more questions. We walked back toward the elevator.

He pressed the up button for me and kept his arm on my shoulder until the doors opened. Normally this display of affection would have made me feel awkward, but with Rocco it made me feel protected, secure, even at the age of twenty seven. After the death of John Mannino, he was the closest thing I had to a father. Nevertheless, when the elevator arrived and I kissed him on the cheek, I was grateful no one was around to see.

Brushing the back of my lapel, he said: “We’re all real proud of you, Nickie…Your mom and me. Your dad would’ve been too.” There was love in his eyes.

I wondered when the time came whether he would rightfully succeed Carmine Capezzi—or be passed over. The ramifications of either alternative saddened me deeply.

Chapter 17

A
lthough no more than fifty-five years old, Judge Joseph Graham had the reputation of being an unpredictable and caustic geezer. That’s a polite description—because I liked him. Many thought he was crazy, mostly assistant D.A.’s, few of whom he liked.

Known in courthouse circles as three-gun Graham, he took the bench with three pearl handled revolvers: two shoulder-holstered, and one behind his back in Peter Gunn fashion. He also had a fourth revolver holstered at his right ankle. It is believed he added this additional artillery sometime after the name “three-gun” was permanently attached.

Although he was smart as hell, and therefore, receptive to a good legal argument, researching carefully his decisions and quite generous to the defense in plea-bargaining, he was much too discordant as a rule. With his sloppy appearance, and a reputation for eccentricity, he often had to fight for the judicial respect afforded other judges. In the process, he made enemies—on both sides of the bar.

As I stood before him to take a plea in the
People v. Raymond Jackson
, his honor was in an unusually jocular mood—unusual for Graham, especially on a Monday morning.

The cold weather had fogged up the courtroom’s windows, while radiators beneath them hissed and clanged as a hard rain fell outside. Three out of six overhead globe lights were out. When thunder started to roll out over the building, and the day darkened and lightning cracked the sky, the atmosphere inside the courtroom became surreal.

With my client standing at my side, Graham ordered the assistant D.A. and me to approach the bench. He told us that my client had written him a letter, congenial, courteous and respectful as it was, pleading for leniency. Evidently Graham was moved by it. Unfortunately it would do Raymond Jackson no good.

Jackson was a predicate felon caught with a loaded revolver (the case now before Graham) while attempting to beat a subway fare by jumping a turnstile. Less than ten years earlier he’d been arrested and convicted for robbing a Bronx bodega with two others. Jackson was merely the lookout. His court-appointed lawyer took an open plea, which meant, within sentencing guidelines, his fate was totally up to the judge.

In my entire career as a criminal defense lawyer—and I’m sure this is true of many able minded attorneys—I never took an open plea in state court. It’s just not done. You either make a deal you’re satisfied with, or go to trial—the risk of leaving sentencing to the broad discretion of the judge, an unwise gamble.

Jackson’s open plea was entered only one month after his arrest—at his first appearance in Bronx Supreme Court moments after his arraignment on the indictment. His attorney had been Charlie Farkas, known otherwise around the Bronx Criminal Courts as “bleed ‘em and plead ‘em” Farkas.

I had always heard of ambulance chasers in personal injury cases. But I never saw a courthouse shyster work a hallway like Farkas. Working out of a storefront office on Sheridan Avenue, directly across from the Bronx Criminal Court, for just a hundred or two, he’d take a case. Then, commanding thousands, he’d collect whatever he could, and when the money ran out, so would his effort (as limited as it was to begin with). A guilty plea was sure to follow.

And he got away with it, time and again.

Raymond Jackson did not deserve to go to jail for jumping a turnstile, loaded gun or not, for no less than two, and no more than four years—the mandatory minimum for a predicate felon in 1982.

Three witnesses saw Jackson scale that turnstile: the token booth clerk, a retired postal worker on his way across town to do volunteer hospital work, and one of New York’s finest. When searched, a .32 caliber pistol was found in Jackson’s waistband, along with a phony Toys ‘R Us police badge and whistle. Jackson was a wannabe cop, who, because of his prior felony conviction, was ineligible to join the force. He had jumped that turnstile after receiving a 911 beep from his girlfriend signaling she was in labor and about to give birth to their second child. But that wasn’t all there was to Raymond Jackson’s story.

On weekends Jackson, along with half a dozen other volunteers, patrolled his neighborhood in the Soundview section of the Bronx. Their primary goal was to ward off street crime, particularly the corner-drug trafficking trade endemic to almost every South Bronx neighborhood.

Raymond Jackson was doing his part, and more, to make his world, and the world of his neighbors, friends and family, a better place. And
I
couldn’t do a damn thing to help him.

In a political climate of one-year mandatory jail time for first offense loaded gun possession, for a predicate felon like Jackson, the gun charge would stand. And as a predicate felon, he could only plea down to an E felony with a minimum indeterminate sentence of two to four years.

I wanted to strangle Charlie Farkas.

Raymond Jackson, two heads taller than me and black as a moonless night, took the plea that Monday, amid the objection of thunder, and lightning, in one cold and drafty courtroom.

Although it was unheard of to let a predicate felon walk out of Bronx Supreme Court facing a certain two to four, Graham allowed Jackson to remain free pending sentencing six weeks later.

But that’s why I liked Joseph Graham.

The assistant D.A. had a shit fit—for appearance’s sake. And I did believe Graham secretly hoped Jackson would skip, live a happy life somewhere else with his common law wife and children. I know I did. Sadly, if Jackson
had
chosen to skip, he would have done so with only his first born. The baby his girlfriend delivered while he was under arrest was stillborn.

On the way back to Executive Towers I stopped by Farkas’ storefront office, took a deep breath, and let the expletives fly. When I was done, to my shock and dismay, his son stormed out of a rear storage room and tore across the office like an uncaged lion.

I had forgotten about Charlie Junior. I had also forgotten that before he started law school he was an all-city running back at Fordham U.

As I braced myself to sail through the plate glass window behind me, the bell atop the storefront door rang and the huge shadow of Raymond Jackson cast its way into the office.

“Hold it right there,” Jackson shouted. Charlie Junior froze in mid-stride behind his still-seated iceberg of a father. I expected the fear on Junior’s face would soon melt into a yellow puddle at his feet, for his knees shook as his eyes fixed in horror on the sight of the colossal Raymond Jackson.

“I’ll do my time, and make the best of it.” Jackson said. “And in the end I’ll be all right, but you…you will always be a leech lawyer feeding on people’s misfortunes. I pray your young one there learns a better way.”

“You finished?” Charlie Sr. asked with brazen disdain. “Now don’t let the door hit you two in the ass on the way out.”

I looked up at Jackson, who with a sardonic grin turned and held the door open as I walked under his extended arm and into the street.

Among the sounds of the Sheridan Avenue traffic, a bus hissing to a stop, and the chatter of passersby, Jackson just smiled, and said “see ya.”

As he walked away I gave him one last look of apology—or perhaps it was a request for forgiveness.

Chapter 18

B
renda handed me a stack of phone messages.

“Nick, please give me any typing you have. I’m leaving at four. Jasmine has tests.”

In heels, even half heels, Brenda was an imposing figure, and she was noticeably gaining weight with each passing week. What was always a healthy cherubic face, had grown tired, older, and darker lines, darker than her dark black skin, hung like half moons under her eyes. I patted her on the shoulder and handed her a Hershey bar.

“Here. Give this to that pretty little girl of yours after she leaves the hospital. When I was a kid my mom would always give me one after I got a shot.”

“Well then you’d better buy a whole bag full because she’s a pin cushion already.”

I looked over my phone messages.

Brutus Washington’s wife called: W
ants to know why after two months her husband is still in jail.
Maybe it had something to do with Brutus trying to kill his next-door neighbor with a hatchet, and his caring Mrs., now phoning his lawyer, squandering the bail money his mother gave her on a VCR and some smack. I set her message aside.

Eleanor had called too:
Love and kisses and call me back.

There was a message from a Father Karras from Saint Nicholas of Tolentine:
Please call me re Peter Guevara.

Father Karras?
I thought to myself. Where had I heard that name before? Was this the priest Guevara talked about? The priest that saved him from being gang raped in the orphanage as a boy? Guevara had never mentioned his name. Then it struck me: Damien Karras was the priest in
The Exorcist
.

I immediately dialed his number.

An elderly man answered and curtly asked me to hold. I heard the receiver quickly pass hands.

“Father Karras?”