A Prayer for the City (21 page)

McGovern stood in that small and claustrophobic space between the rows of spectators and the judge’s bench, his arms folded like a circumspect schoolboy, waiting for the verdict. A little bit before 10:00
A.M.
, Judge Temin appeared to render a verdict, the decision entirely in her hands since Taylor had requested a non-jury trial. McGovern knew virtually all the judges in the system, and after a while when you knew a judge, you could predict with regularity those willing to grant some degree of mercy and those who saw mercy as something that God could sort out once the defendant died in prison. McGovern didn’t know Temin. He had never tried a major case in front of her, and he did not know what to expect.

She asked the defendant to rise. He did so, standing obediently in that ill-fitting suit. She looked at him and announced her verdict.

Guilty of murder. Guilty of murder in the first degree.

Several members from the white side of the courtroom began to applaud, as if they were at a sporting event, but they stopped when the court crier yelled, “Quiet, please!” The courtroom fell silent, the only sound the click of the handcuffs around Will Taylor’s small wrists. Several sheriff’s deputies surrounded him and took him away through the back of the courtroom, and there was the sound of a slam of a door. Sentencing was set for November 30, but it was moot since first-degree murder in Pennsylvania carried a minimum sentence of life imprisonment without parole. The only other sentence would have been the death penalty, but since Will Taylor was still fifteen, he was too young for that. Instead of dying some day by lethal injection, he would simply die in prison instead.

Outside the courtroom, Joe Duczkowski, Keith’s older brother, hugged a friend and said, “Let’s go, man! Everything’s made!”

Inside the courtroom, Will Taylor’s mother sat in the front row, rocking back and forth, moaning softly in a kind of mantra, vomiting into a metal wastepaper basket with a black plastic liner.

Outside the courtroom, Joe Duczkowski talked about his brother’s legacy as a Golden Gloves fighter and said of the verdict, “That was his last fight, and he won it.”

Inside the courtroom, the sound of the vomiting coming from Will Taylor’s mother continued. A little girl watched, then ran to the back and shielded her eyes.

Outside the courtroom, on the way back to his office, Mike McGovern said he felt the way he used to feel at law school, when actually linking the law with the ideals of justice wasn’t considered some pathetic form of naïveté. “No amount of money can compensate for the feeling you get when the mother of the dead guy says, ‘Thank you, God bless you, I’ll do anything for you.’ ” He knew those feelings would not last—another case in a week or two, another pumping of emotion—but standing on Broad Street, the glowering frown of City Hall behind him, he said he felt like the best lawyer in the entire world—proud of the legal system, proud of the judge who hadn’t been swayed by sympathy, proud of the family of the victim who had put their faith in him, proud of himself. He was a prosecutor, and he was ready to mark the file murder in the first degree.

“There will be another case tomorrow, but this guy is slam-dunked. In terms of this town, he’s out of here. I don’t have to worry about him anymore.”

Right around the corner from the courtroom, the mayor sat at the table in his office surrounded by some of the keenest and cleverest minds in the city. The verdict had been handed down only hours earlier. They were all aware of what had just happened and even more aware of how this could be a major black eye for the city unless it was immediately addressed and handled. The injustices and inequities that had been revealed must be righted. Somehow, some way, the Miss International U.S. Beauty Pageant must be saved. Somehow, Miss North Dakota and Miss Tennessee, not to mention Miss Minnesota and Miss Georgia and Miss Virginia and all the rest had to get the toothy gleams back in their smiles.

The previous day by happenstance Rendell himself had witnessed the spectacle of pageant contestants beating on the sides of a police van outside a hotel as it carted off the show’s sponsor. The mayor didn’t know what was going on, but the sight of those crying, screaming beauty-show contestants in such pain and agony over the loss of their dreams and their entrance fees moved him. He swung into action that very same day, at around midnight, calling a member of his staff, marshaling the forces of the city to turn the nightmare of these girls into a fairy tale. He got the hotel they were about to be evicted from to let them stay for free. He arranged for tours of the city, and he talked various restaurateurs into letting the contestants have a night on the town.

That Friday around noon, two hours after Will Taylor had been carted off to prison for the rest of his life with a single tear in each eye, the mayor held a press conference to publicize his monumental efforts on behalf of a beauty contest. “This way, ladies,” said Deputy Chief of Staff Ted Beitchman, ushering the fallen contestants into the Reception Room as if they were survivors of a year-long hostage crisis. Three reporters had been in the courtroom when the verdict in the Will Taylor case was reached. Nearly twenty reporters milled about with notebooks and cameras and microphones for what one newspaper later dubbed “Beauties and the Feast,” filing through the rows of the Reception Room like prep-school boys trying to coax shy girls to dance, gently bending down to get all the details from Miss Tennessee and Miss North Dakota and Miss Minnesota. The girls themselves sat in the front row, pretty and prim, the white sashes proclaiming their states running in neat diagonal lines from shoulder to sternum like cellophane wrapping on a piece of processed cheese. In between answering questions, they munched on a spread of hoagies and
chicken wings, and whereas they were polite and artful, they could also feel the power.

“Are we going to a baseball game?” warbled Miss Georgia.

“Do you want to go to a baseball game?” warbled back the mayor.

At the front of the Reception Room, underneath all those portraits of mayors past, various city officials beamed like groomsmen at a wedding party. They knew they were onto something. “Talk about getting mileage!” said press secretary Feeley, watching one reporter after another sidle up to the pageant contestants. Even the wire services were there, which meant national coverage. Sure enough, that following Sunday
The New York Times
had a story with a headline that read,
PHILADELPHIA RESCUES STRANDED CONTESTANTS
, and the mayor was cast as a worthy hero. “I figured these young ladies from all over the country would have nothing but bad thoughts and would always remember their awful experience in Philadelphia, which was humiliating and tragic, and I didn’t want that to happen,” he was quoted as saying.

It was another sublime moment for the mayor, another perfect bull’s-eye in the game of creating the perception of change. Eight months into the term a remarkable amount had gone well, more than anyone, friend or foe, would have predicted. But absent the one piece that could make the miracle of a reborn city truly plausible, it still was all largely illusory. Blocking the road to glory and national acclaim were the city’s four major unions. Together they numbered nearly twenty-five thousand members, and the tentacles of their power reached deep into every politician in the city. They also knew what they could do with a slowdown here and a work stoppage there and the ultimate weapon of an all-out strike to create an image of the city so different from the one the mayor was groping to create—not once-scorned beauty contestants with beauteous smiles, but pictures of stinking garbage piled to the heavens on city streets and angry workers with picket signs, the portrait of a city in chaos. It was contract time, and it seemed unlikely the unions could be bought off with hoagies, chicken wings, free hotels, or even free tickets to a baseball game. They wanted more, much more.

Ed Rendell talked tough, but that was in public, when the television cameras were on and the rating agencies were in town. In private, Ed Rendell had an impossibly hard time saying no to anyone about anything. This would be the ultimate test of his term as mayor, the true defining moment. And if the best barometer of the future was the behavior of the past, then he seemed likely to flunk it.

A
ll during the spring and summer of 1992, the legend of David L. Cohen had spread through the city like an urban version of the story of Davy Crockett, but with a pulsating beeper strapped to his belt instead of a hunting knife. Some in the administration had taken to calling him the boy wonder. “David, my lord,” people said over the phone to him. There was some suggestion that perhaps the time had come to have his name in raised red letters every time it appeared in print, as Christian Scriptures do for the names of saints.

“I have to be seen with you,” Bill Batoff, a prominent Democratic fund-raiser, had told him when insisting that they have dinner together.

“That may be the most pathetic line of all time,” said Cohen.

The
Inquirer
was the first to extol his skills, which it did in a front-page story that was so gushing and complimentary that the only thing missing was a picture of Cohen water-skiing on one foot down the Delaware with the mayor on his back while returning phone calls. Then came
Philadelphia Magazine
and ultimately the
Daily News
, all in the same reverential tone. There was some suggestion that the city get rid of its famous Thanksgiving Day Parade and the ringing of the Liberty Bell on July Fourth and just have David Cohen Day, a day on which every city employee stayed home and Cohen did all their jobs—garbage pickup, traffic enforcement during rush hour, restaurant inspections.

In a city where public officials were routinely carved and quartered, the treatment of Cohen was without precedent, as if there were truly something mythical about him, not simply in his remarkable capacity to work and get things done but also in his capacity to deny himself any of the basic pleasures of life if they ever conflicted with his work.

Quite obviously any comparison of Davy Crockett with David L. Cohen was ludicrous. Davy Crockett had survived the rigors of the Tennessee wilderness, killed a few bears and maybe a few men, but how could any of that compete with the deprivation David Cohen suffered as chief of staff when he attended a Genesis rock concert and discovered, to his absolute mortification, that the music was so loud he couldn’t hear himself over his cellular phone? Davy Crockett had died an epic death at the Alamo, but during the summer of 1992 David Cohen actually went on vacation with his family to Martha’s Vineyard, thereby absenting himself from the office for two whole weeks as opposed to the usual two hours, during which he went home and, instead of sleeping on a bed, presumably just went into a darkened closet and hung by his knees from the tie rack. He had claimed he was looking forward to the vacation, that he had no apprehensions about being away. But the memo he wrote just before he left, two and half single-spaced pages entitled “Vacation Memorandum of David L. Cohen,” revealed the true inner soul.