The Importance of Being Dangerous (6 page)

GRIFF HAD THE KNOWLEDGE
, born of hundreds of hard cases. Working for so much disadvantage had taught him a great deal about advantage. Then along came the story of the four Bronx schoolgirls, which quietly broke his calloused heart. Now he was ready to make a decision—or at least to make a game out of it. A few mornings after playing pool with his new investment crew, Griff's wife Belinda called him a bitch. By the end of that long day, he'd start to build his case to the contrary.

Griff arrived at the ugly gray building on Centre Street, ready to do a defense counsel's losing battle only he knew how to win. His client, Robert Billingsley, was supposed to stand trial that morning, or cop a plea. Mr. Billingsley had decided one day that his four-month-old baby boy should have a yuppie fold-up stroller, the kind made in Germany out of the finest, safest craftsmanship. Mr. Billinsgley was sixteen. The cop stopped him with the aluminum stroller two blocks from the playground in Central Park
where he'd taken it; the owner's baby was not in it. The baby was in the playground with his nanny and the other babies and their nannies. Mr. Billingsley was charged with theft, the second felony on his record, and with resisting arrest. The cop told him to “C'mere, bitch,” and the term didn't sit well with him. The combination of charges against him meant that, if convicted, he could get either one year, two to four, or, if he was charged as an adult, four to six.

Griff wore a charcoal gray three-button gabardine, a Joseph Abboud tie, and a crisp white shirt. Jeffrey Geiger, the spanking new assistant district attorney in charge of the prosecution—known as A.D.A.'s—wore Syms off the rack. His supervisor sat in the back of the courtroom. While Robert Billingsley's mother and his baby's mother waited two rows over, Mr. Billingsley was being brought up from the Tombs, the basement way station where people waiting at Rikers for their trials go the night before. He had been at Rikers two months already, and he looked like it.

“Good morning,” Griff told the A.D.A.

It was clear the young A.D.A. was just trying out his power for the first time. Where Geiger probably came from out on Long Island someplace or Queens or the still all-white sections of Brooklyn, this tall twenty-something man with the square jaw and firm handshake was the business. But to Griff, who had tried his first case when the A.D.A. was running on the freshman track squad in high school, he was another whiteboy in the way. And it wasn't a good morning at all. Everything about it was wrong.

“Good morning, sir,” said the A.D.A., surprised to have to look up to meet Griff's eyes. “We got a change of plans.”

Griff didn't blink. The friendship was over. “Let's let the judge have a listen.” The A.D.A. hesitated and followed Griff over to the judge's bench. “You were saying?”

“Our office has decided not to accept the defendant's plea in the alternative. In fact”—he choked a little on his words—“in fact,
we've decided to charge Mr. Billingsley with felony assault on the arresting police officer and to insist that he be tried as an adult.”

Griff began talking in measured tones, but his thoughts were already in high gear. He couldn't get mad. There were only so many things he could do. Robert Billingsley was sitting at a table, a court officer behind him, and he looked about as clueless as a high school student (because he was one). Rows behind him was his mother, who looked about as helpless as a new crossing guard facing rush-hour traffic (because she was one). His young girlfriend and infant son looked like specks of brown too small to see (because in that place they were). And Griff knew there was no way Mr. Billingsley was getting the option of a year in prison anymore. Griff was fighting for two to four max. Why? Because that could mean less than three, and less than three years in prison meant that when he got out Mr. Billingsley's infant son might still be small enough to be pushed proudly around by his dad in one of those yuppie strollers.

That would beat the time Griff had with his natural father—or his mother. Griff's heroin-addicted parents lost their parental rights after escaping a tenement fire without him when he was two years old. Because his investment banker wife Belinda thought it would be very black of them to live in a renovated Harlem brownstone, they happened to move down the same street from where his life went up in flames about forty years before. Griff was a smart kid. He bounced from foster homes for two or three years, and sure enough he was eventually adopted by an upper-middleclass black family and moved to a suburb in Westchester. Griff was bookish, serious, and sensitive, unless he was fighting or playing pool in his foster parents' basement—then he was just serious. Because he was tall and athletic, his friendships with the white kids around him were shaky. They expected certain things of him, but never to compete with them in class. Winning there meant being alone, so he spent a lot of time alone. By his second year in college
at Brown University, Griff was really alone. His foster parents died of cancer within eight months of each other. They left him a bit of money and a plan. He was going to spend all the money on higher education—he was going to be a lawyer. And as a lawyer, he wasn't going to make any money if that's what it took to keep black families together.

He met Belinda Chambers at Brown. She was a year behind him, but more popular. Belinda was the color of dry sand and had long, straight auburn hair Griff once wrote poems about. She had a tight, bony face, legs like a model's, and wore beautiful clothes that camouflaged her small chest. Belinda was an economics major who, at eighteen, knew she was going to business school. She was going to be wealthier than her parents. And her man was going to “partner” with her—that is, he was going to equal all those things or better them. Tall, angular, smart, and a little radical in an independent thinker sort of way, Griff was the catch to make it all work out right. They looked like an airbrushed ad in
Essence
magazine except for one small particular: Griff could never really please her. In fact, Belinda could never truly stand him.

It wasn't that Griff was a bad guy or a poor fuck. He disappointed a lot of women when he married Belinda after college, and he could leave her silly with orgasm. It was just clear to her that, after he finished Fordham Law School and she graduated from Columbia Business School, he wasn't going to keep up his end of the financial bargain. Forget the cause, defense lawyers like him didn't make any real money. Yeah, she made seven figures at Smith Barney, but the point was equal or better. He was supposed to do that, and he was way off. No matter how long he argued with her for his own value as a husband, a win one day was back to a loss another. Belinda only had to open a catalogue to remind herself of what she was missing. This time was for her, she used to say throughout their twenties and well into their thirties. She'd give him no kids until he could afford the things she deserved.
And she'd be damned if he thought she planned to be a working mother. He knew the terms. Lest he forgot them, as he must have that morning before leaving for court, she was ready to remind him.

“Got it, bitch? Or I'm finally gone,” she said.

You can never be too sure why two people stay together in a marriage. Maybe it was sixty-nine, which, in the absence of making babies, they each had a strong taste for. Maybe it was that she was the only person he knew who could beat him at chess three out of four games. Twenty minutes with Belinda and you understood which financial trends mattered and which were pure bullshit designed to fool small investors. Maybe it was because she dressed so damned well and made sure he did too. They looked like movie stars whenever they were forced to go out together. But the truth probably had something to do with the fact that she kept Griff running toward some kind of financial greatness he couldn't quite figure out but which he always wondered whether his parents, all four of them, would have wanted him to achieve before he died, too. He wondered.

Sidarra posed the perfect problem for him. She was a long way from the best clothes and took a fraction of the time on her nails, face, and hair than Belinda did. But she was a mother, with all that a mother knows instinctively about the world. Belinda would come home talking Wall Street smack and griping about the idiots she put up with, but Griff would start hearing Sidarra's voice in his head. He couldn't get out of his mind the feel of the grip of her hands in his that first night. All his married-man cool disguised his schoolboy wonderment for her. One morning he even woke up from a Sidarra wet dream. He hadn't had a wet dream in twenty-five years. When Belinda asked him what the fuck was wrong with him, he blamed it on her. She went straight to the shower. He stayed in the white six-hundred-count sheets and waited for Tuesday.

Back in the courtroom, Griff played the gentleman motherfucker for Robert Billingsley. He made calculated procedural arguments that made the A.D.A. blink too hard. He recited chapter and verse from the boy's file, showing how his record was made worse by unreasonably aggressive young prosecutors scoring points for their careers and quota-happy cops trying to bait a large black kid into some fatal mistake. The boy didn't fall for it, Griff explained. The only thing Robert Billingsley resisted was humiliation. When the cop called him a bitch, he had the right
not
to remain silent. After that, Griff was able to get his client, shackled and terrified in an orange DOCS jumpsuit, to stand before the judge and politely answer the judge's questions about his priors. The kid was clear. The kid was sincere.

“This is a good kid, your honor,” Griff told the judge after Robert finished. Then he pointed out the boy's mother. He asked his girlfriend to stand up with the baby. “We don't really know if he stole the stroller that day, but we can't blame him for wanting one, can we?” Then he pulled out the final stop. “He reminds me of myself,” Griff told the judge. “He's a young man trying to impress. He could've been you long ago,” he told the old white man in the robe. “Or him,” Griff added, pointing a finger directly at the A.D.A.

The judge appreciated good lawyers, especially among the overworked court-appointed attorneys who hardly knew their clients. Yet he could not allow himself to be swayed by emotion. “Counsel to the bench again,” he demanded. Griff and the A.D.A. stepped up. The judge looked over his glasses at the young white prosecutor. “Mr. Geiger, after hearing what's been said today, do you still stand by your original position regarding Mr. Billingsley?”

Jeffrey Geiger refused to meet Griff's eyes. He was not much older than Mr. Billingsley, so it seemed, and he looked like he would have been much happier drunk under a beach umbrella
during spring break. “We do, your honor. Nothing has changed. This is the defendant's second and third felony offense.”

“What is the point?” Griff asked with calm exasperation.

“I don't need to explain myself to
you,
” Geiger said, finding the courage to repeat the words he'd been taught weeks ago in an A.D.A. training workshop. “I need to make a conviction.”

“That's not a reason,” Griff went on. “That's got nothing to do with this young man, his life, or his infant son's life. There has
got
to be some point to it. Why are you trying to do this?”

The A.D.A. looked irritated. Finally he turned to Griff and said, “Because I can.”

Forgetting the judge, Griff asked, “Well, who the hell are you, young man?”

The A.D.A. was ready now and looked Griff in the eye. “I'm the state, sir. And you're not.”

That's how Griff's decision got started. The judge decided that, given the circumstances, Robert Billingsley should be considered an adult and convicted, but would be sentenced to a minimum of two years and a maximum of four. Maybe not for Mr. Billingsley's infant son, but that was what Griff would call a victory in his line of work.

That night at home, he lay spent on the living room sofa and hoped for sleep, occasionally interrupted by Belinda's heated telephone conversation with a colleague from work. Her voice could still echo with monetary ferocity even at midnight. As usual, somebody on one side of a deal was fucking up again, a guy named Brett Goldman she kept calling “Dick” with a vengeance. Some company, “Solutions,” was too heavy to carry such a lightweight executive. The “bitch” was in over his head, she fumed, losing paperwork, not answering his phone, letting investment companies she'd never heard of into the “angel round” of financing before satisfying due diligence requirements. She was storming around the sleepy Griff, back and forth between rooms, cussing
and fulminating about details he wished would say good night, when he noticed the glossy papers and thick prospectus on the coffee table in front of him. Griff never paid attention to this clutter before, but tonight the Solutions, Inc. logo caught his eye. He began to read part of a deal memo lying on the couch beside him. Suddenly he realized this stuff was not Greek, that he could make sense of it. It didn't sound all that different from the deals a few of his “better” clients went to jail for. While Belinda recounted her frustrations to her friend, Griff learned about the Solutions, Inc. conglomerate and the many public businesses it owned chunks of. Not an angel on the list. Prison construction companies. Public school consulting contracts. Welfare reform “intermediaries.” Defense contractors. Third World “conflict assistance” management consultants. All the kinds of activities people like him usually slept through. But he was awake now.

And that is when Griff made his decision: that till now he had had too much respect for a game that could never respect him, or Robert Billingsley, or four little schoolgirls trying to take a test designed to show their ignorance. For years he had wrapped himself in earnestness and legal rectitude while being seen as nothing more than some sandtrap on the government's favorite golf course and a mere bitch at home. Now, maybe he could play a little. A sumptuous sister and a round-the-way sidekick had shown Griff how to play again. They too could play people like pawns. They too could invent their own rules as they went along. And, in honor of the people who had brought Griff to these conclusions at last, he named the game Whiteboy.