"Do you?"
"Not at the moment. But I will."
"I'm sorry about the Gibbons verdict," I said, realizing I hadn't seen Myra since it'd come down.
"What do you know about the Gibbons verdict?"
"I know it didn't go our way."
"That's for sure."
"And I know you don't think he did it."
Myra shook her head. "It's not a question of thinking. I know he
didn't do it."
"The jury thought so."
"Yeah well, the jury didn't know as much about crime as I do. The
big thing was that Terrell had confessed."
"That's a problem."
"It was, yes."
"But you don't think it was legit?"
"I know it wasn't. They were in that room for about fourteen hours
before Terrell confessed. He never stood a chance."
"You think they convicted just on the confession?"
"There wasn't any direct evidence. The only other thing the police
had was the word of a supposed coconspirator, which they couldn't have brought
in if Terrell hadn't confessed. The confession is what did him in."
"You have good grounds for appeal?"
"Nothing great, no. But you never know."
"Sorry. That must be tough."
"More for Terrell than for me. Anyway, we're here to work on
Lorenzo Tate. So I made a copy of the file, what there is of it at this point,
which is almost nothing. We've got the incident reports, a summary of the
witness statements, some paperwork coming out of the actual arrest."
"What should I be doing?"
"First thing, of course, is we need to go talk to our client. I
represented him at the lineup and arraignment a few days ago, but didn't get a
chance to really talk to him then, other then to tell him to keep his mouth shut
until he saw me again. We've got a meeting at Rikers set up for nine a.m.
tomorrow. Where do you live?"
"Bergen Street, between Fifth and Flatbush."
"I'll come get you around eight fifteen," Myra said. She picked up a couple of large bound documents and handed them to me.
"These are two pretrial omnibus motions from other cases. We'll steal as much as
we can from these in assembling our motion papers, so you should read through
them to get a feel for how we'll proceed."
"Anything that needs doing now?" I asked.
Myra shook her head. "It'll take you a while to read the file and
look at these omnibus motions. You can do that between now and tomorrow
morning."
4
O
UR CLIENT
, Lorenzo Tate, was twenty-six years old. He'd been arrested on the basis of two witness statements. The sister of the surviving victim, Latrice Wallace, had told the police that Lorenzo had come looking for her brother earlier on the night of the shooting and had made threatening remarks. There was no statement from that victim himself, Devin Wallace. I figured this could either mean that his condition was still too serious for him to talk, or that he wasn't cooperating with the police. The eyewitness to the shooting, Yolanda Miller, had said that while she didn't actually know the shooter, she'd seen him around the neighborhood, and had identified him by a street name, Strawberry.
It was after seven by the time I had finished going through the file. Suddenly finding myself working a murder had charged me up; I felt an excess of energy combined with being at loose ends, not a great combination for someone coming off a serious heroin flirtation. A cornerstone of the way I lived now was in how I structured my time, always knowing in advance what I was about to do, first breaking the day down into little pieces, then building it back up again with defined activity. I fought a vigorous campaign against dead air, and finding myself in an unplanned moment was enough to send me into a panic.
I needed to make a plan. Nothing better coming to mind, I called Paul at work.
My years at Walker Bentley had conditioned me to get straight to the point when talking to someone who billed out his time in six-minute intervals.
"I just sort of got promoted," I said. "And I'm at loose ends tonight, thought
I'd see if you wanted to get dinner."
I noticed the pause before Paul spoke. "Sure, pal, but it's going
to have to be on the semi-late side. How's ten?"
"Fine," I said, trying not to think about the hours I'd have to kill in the meantime, trying instead just to focus on the fact that I had carved some order into my night.
"Sure. Meet at Blue Ribbon, get the Black Angus for two?"
Paul laughed. "You can't afford Blue Ribbon anymore," he said.
"You're right," I said. "Steak's on you."
BLUE RIBBON
Brooklyn was on Fifth Avenue in Park Slope, walking distance from my apartment on Bergen. I'd gone home first, changed out of my suit. I was still living in the apartment I'd rented back when I made a corporate lawyer's salary, a spacious one-bedroom with exposed brick walls and a marble fireplace that no longer worked. It was an irony of the New York real estate market that it was financially easier to stay in an apartment that I couldn't afford than it was to pay the broker's fee and moving costs to go somewhere cheaper. I'd had nearly a hundred grand invested and saved when I'd left the firm; much of that money was gone now, and more drained out with each passing month that I lived beyond my present means.
Even though I arrived at the restaurant a few minutes late, Paul wasn't there yet, which wasn't a surprise: he was usually late, just as I had been when I'd worked at Walker Bentley.
I ordered a martini, up with olives, and settled in at the bar to wait. The restaurant was crowded, loud; even the bar was full. Paul came bustling in ten minutes later, wearing a suit but no tie, making his way easily through the packed room. He was tall and thin, with carefully sculpted hair, the first faint signs of encroaching age starting to show on the outskirts of his face. He apologized for being late in the offhand manner of someone who always was.
"I do miss this," I said after we'd been seated and ordered our dinner.
"Miss what?" Paul said.
I gestured out at the restaurant, filled with well-dressed, attractive people eating expensive food.
"The money," I said with a laugh.
"Don't worry about the bill—pay whatever you can afford; I'll
cover the rest."
"I appreciate that," I said. "But I don't like it. I mean, in the
sense that I don't like not being able to pull my end."
"We're friends and it's money," Paul said. "So who gives a fuck?
At least you get to do something sexy. I've been practicing for over five years
and I've spoken in court one time. That's when they sent me to a status
conference to inform the court that we were not opposing the other side's motion
for an extension of time. I can quote my entire speech: 'Your Honor, the
defendant has no objection.' "
"Trust me," I said. "What I've been doing for the past six months
has not been sexy."
"You get to hang out in court all day," Paul said. "Like the
lawyers on TV."
"That's where the similarity ends," I assured him.
Paul raised his glass in a toast. "So, more important,
congratulations on your new case. Skipping all the way to murder—you can't tell
me that's not sexy."
"The murder isn't really my case—another lawyer's going to be the
first chair. I'm just there to do research, that sort of thing—I assume, anyway.
I'm going to be handling misdemeanors with most of my time—minor stuff, really."
"Fuck it, it's still sexy. All crime is sexy. I mean, you know the
kind of shit I do all day. If I'm not careful, I'm going to officially become an
antitrust lawyer. I can't even figure out my own taxes."
"You always seemed to like it okay," I said. "You always seemed to
like it more than I did, anyway."
"More than you did isn't too hard to pull off, pal," Paul said.
"But it does get empty. You know, the 'is that all there is' blues. Lately I've
been seriously thinking of going back to church."
"
Back
to church?"
"When I was a kid I went to church," Paul said. "I wore a clip-on
tie, went with my folks."
"And why are you thinking of going back?"
"I don't know," Paul said. "I want to be better."
"You're going to start going to church to get help being better?"
"That's what church is all about, right? How to be good?"
"You've got a whole lot of better to explore before you get to good," I said.
Paul gave me a look, narrowing his eyes while trying to suppress a smile.
"I mean, no, I'm not in danger of pulling some variation of that prolonged cry
for help you launched, but I know why I do it. I do it for the money, and
because I failed to come up with anything more interesting to do. That's not
really something I'm super proud of."
"Well," I said, "I guess you could say that I'm not super proud of
how I've ended up where I am, either."
"You didn't get there the easy way," Paul agreed as the waiter brought us our steak.
"But I do believe that in some way you got where you were supposed to go. And
that's good enough for a fucking celebration."
WE ATE
our steak and drank our wine, and after the meal we each had an Oban, straight up. I hadn't realized how tense I was until the alcohol relaxed me. I liked the camaraderie of eating steak and drinking scotch. Paul's company relaxed me too; I enjoyed his aggression, his thoughtless will, his attempt to bully the world.
Afterward, we stepped outside into the crisp spring air. The breeze was just enough to make me aware of the fact of weather. I heard Paul inhale a breath, taking in the night. When I glanced over at Paul he was smiling.
"Let's go see if we can find some trouble," he said.
5
M
YRA'S CAR
was already parked across the street when I went out to wait for her the next morning; she honked as soon as I stepped out of my building on Bergen Street. I'd overslept a little; Paul and I had ended up spilling whiskey at the Gate until a little after one a.m. I wasn't at my best; my stomach was clenched and sour, and I could still taste the scotch in the back of my throat.
"Morning," I muttered as I opened the door of her aging Volvo.
"Just throw that shit in the back," Myra said, pointing at the jumble of papers in the passenger seat. I scooped them up and tossed them onto the backseat. Myra was smoking a cigarette, had an old Sleater-Kinney song blasting on the car stereo, both of which were a little much for me first thing on a hungover morning.
"You've been out to Rikers before, right?" she asked as she pulled onto Flatbush.
"Actually, no," I said.
"Rikers isn't so bad," Myra said. "Compared to the real prisons
upstate—Green Haven, Sing Sing—it's a weekend in the Hamptons. There're bad guys
there who couldn't make bail on a hard-core felony, but they're heading to trial
and they've got an incentive to behave. Everybody else who's there has been
sentenced to under a year, meaning they're unlikely to be violent."
"I'm sure you get used to hanging out in jail," I said. "I just
haven't had the opportunity to do so."
"It's bullshit that Lorenzo's being held on a case this thin," Myra said as she pulled onto I-278, which would take us out of Brooklyn, through Queens, and into the Bronx.
"The judge wouldn't grant bail because of all the reporters in the courtroom, didn't want to see himself on the front page for letting loose the college-student killer. His only hook was that the police didn't find Lorenzo for a few days after they'd issued an arrest warrant, which he took to mean flight risk. How's that make him a fucking flight risk? He had four days to get out of town and they arrest him going into his apartment. If anything, he's proven he
won't
leave, even when given motive and opportunity."
"Did you argue that?"
"I thought about it," Myra said. "So, no offense, but I really
don't get why Isaac decided to put you on a murder case. I'd been working as a
PD for over three years before I had my first murder. I spent my first eighteen
months doing nothing but juvie-court delinquent proceedings. Where'd you go to
law school?"
"Why?"
"I bet you went to an Ivy League, didn't you?"
"What does it matter?"
"Harvard?"
"Columbia, actually. Why?"
"I knew it!" Myra exclaimed. "That explains why Isaac is putting
you on this case. Even though he's a socialist, he's also such a total Ivy
League snob. I mean, how fucked-up is that?"
"Every socialist I've ever met has also been an Ivy League snob," I replied.
"I'm just saying that guys like you don't necessarily pay your
full dues. I went to Brooklyn Law School. People hear I'm a public defender,
they assume it's because I couldn't get a real job. People hear you're a public
defender and they assume you've got the world's greatest soul."
"I was a lawyer for four and a half years before I became a public defender," I protested, although my license had actually been suspended for those final six months.
"Isaac told me when I started that I'd probably be able to move on to more
serious cases after six months or so."
"So you go from arraignments to a murder case," Myra said.
"Whatever. It's Isaac's call."
"Is there some reason you don't want me on this case?"
"I haven't had a second chair on any of my cases. Why is Isaac
giving me one now?"
"So you can mentor me?" I said, which got me a quick sardonic look.
"It's because he thinks I'm rattled by the Gibbons case. He thinks
my focus isn't there. Essentially you are a no-confidence vote in me."
"You don't really know that."
"Yes, I do."
"What Isaac told me is that it's a high-profile case, given the
victim. I don't see why that's not a good enough reason to have me on board."
"I have my way of doing things. I'm not a supervisor, I'm not a
trainer, I'm a trial lawyer. I run on instincts, and can't always explain why I
do what I do, and don't have the time or inclination to try."
"Look, I'm just happy to be on the team, okay?"
"But that's the point," Myra said. "There is no team. This is
my
case."
WE DIDN'T
talk much on the rest of the drive. As we finally approached the bridge that led to the jail we pulled into a parking lot and went to a wooden trailer, where we got our passes for entering Rikers. It looked to me like a border checkpoint between third-world countries. I felt a sort of joy at the sordidness of it all, that part of me that responded to being a criminal defense lawyer in a way I had no interest in analyzing.
We got back into the car and drove over the bridge, planes taking off from LaGuardia on our right side. Rikers wasn't what I had expected: the Los Angeles of jails, it was sprawling, disconnected, a bunch of buildings spread out haphazardly across a moody landscape.
We parked in a crowded lot and entered the squat control center. The room was crowded with people trying to get in to see prisoners. I followed Myra to the window for attorneys, where she handed over our passes and filled out a visitation card. The guard stamped our hands and gave us plastic tokens identifying us as lawyers.
Myra led the way out of the main building and back outside. There were seagulls everywhere, used to humans and ignoring our presence. We waited for a bus that took us to the facility where Lorenzo was being held.
Finally we ended up in an interview room, waiting for Lorenzo to be brought in. The room was small, drastically overheated, two chairs on one side of a metal desk, one chair on the other. One wall was a window, two court officers dimly visible on the other side—one had maybe just told the punch line to a joke; both were laughing.
Myra and I waited in near silence for ten minutes. I felt my nerves clutch; looking at Myra I could tell she felt it too, even with her experience. I supposed you never got completely used to sitting in the hostile space of a jail, waiting for a man accused of murder.
Myra filled the time reviewing the papers that made up our initial file; not knowing what else to do, I did the same. Finally the door behind us opened with a protracted metallic screech, and we turned to face our client.
I didn't know what exactly I'd been expecting, but Lorenzo Tate was not it. Perhaps more than anything I'd expected someone intimidating, and Lorenzo certainly wasn't that. He was relatively short, for one thing, under five-eight, and was smiling at us boyishly, looking more like a salesman than an accused murderer. He had fairly light skin, with a noticeable birthmark, a dark bruise-colored discoloration on the upper edge of his face, just above and to the side of his right eye.
Myra introduced me to Lorenzo and we all shook hands. She then launched into a brief overview of how having a public defender worked. The small, stuffy room was even more uncomfortable with Lorenzo in it; I felt myself starting to sweat. Myra asked Lorenzo if he could afford to retain a lawyer.
"How much would I be paying?" Lorenzo asked.
"Prices vary pretty widely. But for a murder case, if it actually goes to trial, I would think even the cheap side's going to be around fifty thousand," Myra said.
Lorenzo looked disappointed by this answer. He glanced down and shook his head.
"No disrespect to you all, but do I need to be getting the money for a real
lawyer?"
"To be honest, Mr. Tate, fifty thousand dollars wouldn't buy you a lawyer that's half as good as we are," Myra said, no hint of bragging in her voice.
"Obviously this is a big decision, and you should do what you feel comfortable
with. I'm not trying to sell you anything—I get paid the same whether you become
my client or not. But don't hire a lawyer just because you've heard generally
bad things about public defenders. Because we, in particular, are good."
Lorenzo was watching Myra carefully as she spoke. When she was done Lorenzo looked over to me, which made me aware that I was smiling slightly. I decided to let myself smile. I was enjoying this. After a long moment Lorenzo nodded.
"That's all right then," Lorenzo said. "I'm gonna be with you
all."
"Then before we get started, I want to tell you two things," Myra said.
"First, you should tell us everything you know, bad or good, that the DA's likely to know or find out. Anything they know that we don't is going to put us at a big disadvantage. We're here to help you, not to judge you, and we can't do that if we don't know what we need to know.
"Second, we're the only people you should talk to about this case. And I mean the only people, and I mean
anything
about this case. Someone here asks you what you're in for, you tell them traffic
tickets. Anything you say to anybody who isn't in this room right now can come
back to haunt us. You understand?"
"I feel you," Lorenzo said.
"Okay. I'd like to start just by getting a little background about who you are, before we get into the case itself," Myra said.
"Were you born in New York?"
"I was raised up in the Gardens," Lorenzo said. "You know Glenwood
Gardens? Off of Avenue I out in Midwood?"
"I don't," Myra said.
"We the old-school kinda project," Lorenzo said. "A big old
compound of high-rises. Ain't no garden there neither."
Myra nodded. "And is that where you still live?"
"I'm up out of the project now," Lorenzo said. "Got me a place on
the avenue."
"Did you finish high school, Mr. Tate?"
"No, ma'am," Lorenzo said. I couldn't believe my ears: an accused murderer from the projects had just called Myra
"ma'am." I was taking notes while Myra asked the questions, and I wrote that down.
"Do you have a job?"
Lorenzo smiled a little, his head bobbing and weaving slightly.
"Do you want to know what I do for green, even if I don't pay no taxes on it,
you know what I'm saying?"
I did, and a quick glance told me that Myra did too. "You mean if you make money doing something that isn't legal, should you admit that to us?" she asked.
Lorenzo again with his boyish smile. I guessed that our client did all right with the ladies.
"I know you can't turn me in or nothin'," Lorenzo said. "I just don't know if
you want to know."
"Everything you tell us is privileged," Myra said. "Meaning
exactly, we can't be forced to turn you in—unless you tell us about a crime you
are planning to commit in the future. The other factor, though, is we pretty
much can't let you say something on the witness stand that we know not to be
true. So, for example, if you confess that you committed the murder in this
case, we'd be limited in how we could let you testify in court that you didn't
do it. Understand?"
"You don't have to worry about me confessing to no murder," Lorenzo said.
"'Cause I sure enough didn't cap no mother's son. I ain't never shot me no gun
in my life."
"Good," Myra said, although I could tell that our client's protestations of innocence didn't mean much to her. Defendants almost always insisted on their innocence to their lawyers, even when doing so was both laughable and unnecessary. The standard office theory was that clients assumed a PD wouldn't work as hard for someone we knew was guilty. What the clients failed to reckon with was that all PDs knew that the vast majority of our clients were, in fact, guilty.
"In terms of how you made money, I think it's important enough that we know that
you should tell us, even if it means admitting to something illegal."
"You can't come up through the Gardens and not be in the life. And
when I was coming up the life meant slinging rock. Wasn't like you could come up
through the Gardens and not sling some rock. But I got that shit behind me, and
I ain't never looked back at it."
"Okay," Myra said. "You ever get busted?"
Lorenzo shook his head.
"
Never?
" Myra said, not trying to hide her skepticism.
"When I was out on the street, nobody cared about making no busts
up in the Gardens. I got off the street soon as I was able, and I stayed off.
I'm, like, all deep in the background now. Plus, these days I just be involved
with the chronic. Ain't nowhere near the same green, but motherfuckers ain't
getting capped over no Buddha."
"You're saying you're just involved with pot?" I asked.
Lorenzo nodded. "Got me this fine hydro shit, don't even have to
bring it in from outside the city. It's like a bud grows in Brooklyn, know what
I'm saying?"
"Well," Myra said, "it will certainly be helpful that you don't
have a criminal record."
Lorenzo grinned his charmer's grin. "Knew there must be some reason I be keeping myself clean all this time," he said.
We all smiled at this. I found myself liking Lorenzo.
"Do you remember where you were on the night of April 6?" Myra asked.
Lorenzo nodded and leaned forward. "I been thinking on that. I was
chillin' with my boy Marcus—I was at his crib until two in the morning or
thereabouts."
"What were you two doing?"
There was a pause, and Lorenzo looked away. "Marcus and me, we're,
like, on the same team, you know what I'm saying?"
Myra narrowed her eyes a little. "I'm not sure I do," she said after a moment. I didn't either: I wasn't sure if Lorenzo was revealing Marcus to be a fellow dealer or a boyfriend, but guessed the former was the more likely.
"Do you mean you work together?"
Lorenzo smiled and nodded.
"That may mean he's not our ideal alibi witness," Myra deadpanned.
"Do you know if Marcus has ever been busted?"
"Marcus just ain't as lucky as I am," Lorenzo said. "He's gone
down a couple of times."
Myra didn't try to hide her disappointment. "A good alibi isn't necessary, although it certainly never hurts," she said.
"I was with Marcus till late that night," Lorenzo insisted.