The Mayor of Lexington Avenue (11 page)

In the modern world of relativism it was known as selective recall.

Rudy was a little different from H.V.’s run-of-the-mill clients. H.V.’s testimony in criminal cases had usually related to insanity or competency to stand trial. But in Rudy’s case Tracey wanted to test a unique legal theory: that because of his limited intelligence Rudy was unable to comprehend
and
waive his Miranda rights. It was about more than competency, an argument Tracey knew she might lose. It was about competency combined with naïveté. Tracey wanted to be able to argue to the judge that, because of his diminished mental capacity, Rudy simply could not refuse to talk to Wesley Brume when Wesley asked him a question, regardless of the fact that Wesley had advised him of his right to remain silent. Because it was a tricky point, H.V. had been given carte blanche in the spending department, an opportunity he did not fail to exploit. The first order of business was a trip to Bass Creek to visit his patient.

Rudy had been in the Cobb County jail for about three weeks when H.V. showed up. Like everyone, Rudy had heard horror stories about jail and was expecting the worst. But it was all quite calm—boring, actually. There were very few prisoners in the county jail and Rudy settled into a routine early on: breakfast in the morning at seven, karate exercises after that, then pushups and situps. The guard had told him he’d literally have to fight for his ass when he hit the state prison system and Rudy wanted to be ready. In the afternoon he did some cardiovascular work, playing basketball or running around the exercise area.

Elena came in the afternoon. She was allowed to come every day because it was county jail, but her visits were hard on Rudy. He was used to hugging and kissing his mother. Seeing her every day but not being able to touch her was like torture. It might have been better if her visits had been less frequent, but nobody could convince either of them of that fact. Elena had never been overprotective of Rudy. She knew it was going to take longer for her son than most young men, but she had always wanted him to stand on his own two feet. Now he was in prison and it was, at least in part, her fault. This was new territory. She didn’t know if Rudy was strong enough to handle such an ordeal. She just wanted him to know she was there for him—every day.

At night, he had books and magazines to read that Elena had brought. Sometimes, though, in the middle of the night he’d dream about state prison and being attacked by gangs of men. They’d call him “stupid” and “dummy” as they held him down for the final act of humiliation. Rudy always woke up before it happened. Shaking and sweaty, he’d lie there for hours, afraid to close his eyes.

I’ll never let it happen
, he told himself.
They’ll have to kill me first.
Then he’d think of the osprey. Flying above it all, swooping down at the perfect moment for the kill. Or the gator, biding his time, always staying cool.
I’ll be like them. Fearless, ready to kill.
Only then could he fall back to sleep.

His first visitor, besides his mother, was Tracey James herself. Tracey came the second week. She really didn’t need to see Rudy, didn’t need to hear his story at this point. She just wanted to eyeball him, get a feel for the extent of his intellectual deficit, so she could provide a firsthand observation to the judge when the time came. Unlike regular visitors who talked to the prisoners through a screen, Tracey actually met Rudy in a room where they could face each other and talk.

“I’m your lawyer,” she told him after she introduced herself. Rudy smiled.

“I know. My mother told me all about you. She said you’re the best.” It was Tracey’s turn to smile, even blush a little.

“I don’t know about that, but we are going to do our best to get you out of here.”

“I know.” Rudy repeated the words with such confidence that even Tracey was taken aback. Most of her clients were a little less confident and a little more demanding and colorful in their choice of words. Tracey felt the need to file a disclaimer.

“I can’t guarantee anything. There’s a possibility we’ll lose.”

“I know,” he repeated again, still smiling at her. “But you’ll do your best.”

Tracey didn’t know how to respond to such a pleasant, reasonable observation. “Yes, well, I have a few questions to ask you and I want you to respond to just those questions and nothing more. We’ll talk more after I get a copy of your statement to the police, but for now let’s stick to the questions I ask. Okay?”

“Sure,” Rudy replied, the same smile on his face.
Doesn’t he know where he is?
Tracey wondered.

Later that day, Tracey filed her motion to have bond set. Rudy was now being held without bond and she debated whether to file the motion at all. Elena could barely raise the reduced retainer and she had no property that could serve as collateral. Bond in a capital case was going to be over a hundred thousand dollars, at the very least. Elena could neither post bond nor convince a bondsman to post it on her behalf. As a practical matter, the motion was a waste of time. However, it was a billable waste of time and Tracey’s specialty was churning hours.

When they first met, H.V. had not been surprised by Rudy’s upbeat nature even though he was in jail. H.V. had worked with retarded children in Connecticut for a year during his residency and had noticed that they were consistently cheerful. He remembered one of his colleague’s remarks as they were observing a classroom of children laughing and having fun:

“And they’re the retarded ones. I don’t think so.”

H.V. recalled those words the moment Tracey told him about Rudy and his inability to say no to Detective Brume. None of those kids he remembered would have or could have refused. The hard part would be explaining this to a judge.

H.V. tried to be as upbeat as Rudy during that first meeting, pasting a smile on his face and extending his hand.

“Hi Rudy, I’m Harry Fischer.” He never, ever referred to himself as Harry. It had taken him years to cultivate the moniker H.V. among colleagues and patients and the few friends that he had. But this was a rare event—fieldwork—and a unique assignment that called for a different, more flexible approach. He needed Rudy to feel totally relaxed in his presence.

“Hi, Harry,” Rudy replied, shaking Harry’s hand. Harry seemed like a nice guy but he looked a little out of sorts dressed in blue jeans, tee shirt and running shoes. “Can I get you something, Harry? Coffee? Tea?”

H.V. looked around somewhat bewildered. They were in a small room with a table, the same room where Rudy met Tracey James the week before. H.V. wondered how the kid could order up drinks. Rudy watched him looking around but didn’t say anything.

“They let you do that?” H.V. finally asked. He saw the smile start to form on Rudy’s face and he knew he’d been had. Nothing left to do but laugh at himself.

They laughed a lot that day. Harry really enjoyed himself. It brought him back to a time in his career when he was working with kids and having fun, even making a difference. He came away from the meeting convinced that Rudy was a lot smarter than his IQ suggested, but he did have that simple, wonderful naïveté of the retarded. He had convinced himself. Now he had to convince the court that Rudy could no more have refused to talk to Wesley Brume than a dog could refuse to chase a cat that ran across its path.

Before that day in court, however, H.V. had a lot of work to do: gathering school and medical records and poring over them for hours; a few more visits to Rudy; psychological tests; intelligence tests. Most of it was fluff, window dressing for his underlying opinion. But it would serve its purpose in one important regard—as justification for his exorbitant fee.

Fourteen

1966

It had been a sweltering summer in the city and this night in late August was no different. Johnny was in the back room of his parents’ four-room railroad flat, his room, lying in his bed by the open window trying to drift off to sleep.

“You’re not sleeping, are you?” He recognized Mikey’s voice coming from the fire escape.

“No. But not tonight, Mikey. I can’t. I’m too tired.” All summer long the boys had been saying goodnight to their parents, going to bed, and then sneaking out the back window, down the fire escape, and up the alley to the street and freedom. They didn’t do it every night, usually just Friday and Saturday, but this week had been unusual and Johnny was exhausted.

“I don’t want to go out either. Just wanted you to know I lined up a job for us when school starts.” It was the “us” that caused Johnny to sit up and take notice. Mikey was always lining up jobs for “us”—like the job at Jimmy the Shoemaker’s. Johnny loved the job but Mikey made most of the money.

“I make thirty dollars a day, sometimes forty on a Saturday,” he had told Johnny when he was recruiting him to be his understudy. Johnny had forgotten to ask how much he was going to make. And that wasn’t Mikey’s only job. In the wintertime, he worked at Schuler’s cleaners on Lex, just a few stores up from Jimmy’s, delivering dry-cleaning.

Johnny started to protest but gave up. When Mikey had an idea, he was so positive and enthusiastic there was no talking him out of it, so why try?

“So what’s the new job?” Johnny asked, his eyes still half closed. Mikey leaned against the fire escape and folded his legs up so that his knees were at the same height as his shoulders. He was dressed in nothing but his Fruit of the Looms. He never wore an undershirt.

“We’re gonna be ushers at church.”

“What? Us? Ushers? That’s a job for rich old men. They’d never hire us. Besides, I’ve had enough of church to last me a lifetime.”

His response didn’t even cause Mikey to pause. “We’re all set. I’ve already talked to Tom. We’ve got the job.” That was Mikey. Tom Roney was a funeral director who had buried almost every prominent New Yorker who’d ever lived. He supervised the ushers as a public service. Somehow he was “Tom” to Mikey. “Pays eight bucks a Mass. Four Masses a week. And we don’t have to hang around for the whole show. We just have to seat people, take their money halfway through and usher ’em out at the end. You get it? That’s why they call us ushers.”

“How’d you line this up?”

“I ran into Tom last week after church. He told me he was looking for a couple of ushers. Asked me if I knew anybody. I scoped it out a little more as to time and money, then I told him you and I would take the job.

“Why’d ya do that without talkin’ to me?”

“Hey, it might not be there tomorrow. Ya gotta strike while the iron is hot. You can always back out.” He paused for a moment like Johnny knew he would. “But you won’t wanna. This is easy work. Easy money.” Johnny just nodded. Like it was going to be real easy staying out all Saturday night and getting up at the crack of dawn on Sunday. He didn’t say anything, just smiled to himself. He knew it would be fun. Everything he did with Mikey was fun.

They started the next week, eight o’clock Mass, and they actually made it on time: black suits, black ties, black shoes, white shirts. Very white faces, at least for Johnny. He’d puked before leaving the house that morning. He was sixteen now, Mikey was seventeen, and they’d started drinking—courage for the Saturday night dance. Maybe they could meet a girl. Maybe they could “make out,” although Johnny would have been happy just to get to the meeting stage. You needed courage to do that. At least he did. Mikey just liked to drink. “Courage” was a couple of half quarts of Colt 45 Malt Liquor. Malt liquor got you buzzed quicker than the regular stuff but it also made you a whole lot sicker. Johnny spent his first day on the job seating people, puking; taking the collection, puking; ushering people out at the end of Mass, puking. So far this job was working out as expected.

Father Charles Burke was the pastor of St. Francis parish, a big Irishman with a warm heart and a predisposition for good scotch. He too was one of Mikey’s fans. In fact, he gave Mikey his nickname after nine o’clock Mass one Sunday. Johnny had just finished escorting Mikey’s mother down the church steps because Mikey was incapacitated at the time. It was his turn to “hug the bowl,” as they endearingly called it.

“Good morning, Mary,” Father Burke sang in his best Irish brogue. (He was born on Jerome Avenue in the Bronx.) “And where’s the Mayor of Lexington Avenue?” He looked at Johnny, who didn’t have a clue what he was talking about.

“Who?” Mary Kelly asked.

“Young Michael. The Mayor of Lexington Avenue.” He repeated the title as if they both should have recognized it as a matter of course.

“And why do you call him that, Father?” she asked. They were standing on the sidewalk in front of the church. It was a beautiful, sunny Sunday morning but Mary Kelly, the mother of three boys, was sure a very dark rain cloud was about to pass over her head. “The Mayor of Lexington Avenue” was a prelude to something bad, she was sure.

“Well, Mary,” Father Burke replied, “the boy serves Mass for these people. He ushers them in and out of church on Sunday. He delivers their dry-cleaning and shines their shoes—all with that smile of his. He knows everybody and everybody knows him. He’s more popular than me and I’ve got God and the pulpit on my side.”

“Why thank you, Father,” Mary replied, wondering where this was going. She found out soon enough.

“He’s seventeen now, Mary. Has he ever thought of the priesthood? He’d make an excellent priest. Perhaps you should mention it to him.” Johnny wanted to crawl under the car that he was leaning on at the time. He had no idea why Father Burke broached the subject while he was there. He just hoped he wasn’t next. His mother was already thinking that way. Just one word from Father Burke and they’d be packing him up and shipping him off to the seminary. He hadn’t even gotten laid yet. He stared straight down at the sidewalk and waited for Mrs. Kelly to give up her youngest son, his best friend. “Better him than me” was the thought that whizzed through his brain.

Mary Kelly was not about to deliver Mikey to the priesthood, that morning or ever. She understood how people could see Mikey as some sort of angelic person: the red hair, the freckles, the smile—that smile. He had a little space between his two front teeth that made it even more enchanting. Not to say it wasn’t genuine. Mikey had a zest for life and an affection for people that was unique. But he was no angel. Neither was this tall, pimple-faced sixteen-year-old next to her—his partner in crime. They were all boy and they were heading in many directions at once but none of those roads led to the priesthood—Mary Kelly was sure of that!